Fabric of my Life.

In praise of white walls.

kate — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:03:20 +0000

I recently received a pre-publication copy of Home for Now: Living Well Without Staying Long** from Gestalten (published today).

The premise of the book is about creating meaningful, personal spaces in homes you don’t own, and has been co-edited with Earl of East, the East London based lifestyle brand, perhaps best known for their candles. It’s packed full of people who’ve made rented flats feel layered, intentional, and alive; people who didn’t wait for permanence to decide how they wanted to live.

I’ve rented for almost twenty years now—first down in London, then Manchester, now a little further out—and I’ve always strived to make my rental home feel as much mine as possible. And yet there’s one thing I’ve never felt comfortable doing in a rental, and that’s painting the walls. We’ve been in our current home for over five years now and the walls are still entirely white. Smudgy, smeary, slap-dash white, but, thankfully, white and not 90s magnolia (I think I’d have relented in the first week had they been magnolia!).

I say “entirely white” but I’m lying. A few years ago my husband revamped his downstairs office, put brush-to-paint-pot and doused the entire room in two shades of blue: Lick’s Teal 03 and Blue 01. I’m sitting in my white-walled office as I write this, despite having flirted many times over the past five years with colour drenching my own walls.

Last month I went to a design dinner at The Ivy in Manchester, hosted by Resi*, an architectural practice founded by Sam Depledge, one of relatively few women leading a practice of this scale. The other guests were design bloggers and influencers I hadn’t met before, all of them homeowners with enormous Instagram audiences and the kind of interiors that litter Pinterest inspiration boards. I was, I think, the only renter in the room and, quite possibly, the only person there without a loft conversion in progress. The Resi team were warm and generous hosts, and it turned out to be one of those evenings where a pleasant dinner turned into a whirpool f ideas swimming about my head, and not enough time in the day to capture them all.

Resi had put together a 2026 trend forecast drawn from hundreds of real client projects rather than aspirational mood boards, and it was fascinating to see how the interior tides are starting to shift, from the decline of open-plan living (which I’ve always loved aesthetically, but could never have committed to practically) to the rise of high-functioning entryways incorporating mud rooms and dog baths. One trend stood out immediately: what Resi are calling “the beige-free zone”. A conscious move away from safe neutrals toward grounded, atmospheric colour, that embraces texture over minimalism. Their Colour of the Year is Broccoli Brown, a dark, sumptuous shade that cocoons rather than performs. Mark Hood, their Head of Architecture, described it as “choosing a space that feels like a hug rather than a showroom,” which is either very apt or very “marketing-speak”, depending on your mood. I’ve decided it’s pretty good, since it’s a shade that reminds me of a warm mug of cocoa, aka a-hug-in-a-mug. They’re also seeing the return of colour capping: painting the lower third or two-thirds of a room including the woodwork, rather than the dated single accent wall, which I’m certainly happy to see the back of. “When a client says they want to add colour,” Mark says, “it’s rarely just a design preference; it’s a declaration of intent. They aren’t usually looking for a specific hex code, they’re looking for permission.“

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In my mind there are two groups of people who end up with what people often term “boring white walls”, and they arrive there from opposite directions.

The renter’s version is something like: “I can’t, so why bother thinking about it?” You usually need your landlord’s permission, then have to source the paint, do the work, live with it for however long you’re there, then paint it all back when you leave. And for what? Three years of terracotta walls you’ll have to erase anyway? Isn’t it better to spend that money on a sofa you can actually take with you?

The homeowner’s version is different: “I can, but what if I get it wrong?” So tester pots accumulate on the floor for months, resale value hovers somewhere in the back of your mind, and there are simply too many options—Farrow & Ball alone has 132 colours—and choosing one means ruling out 131 others. What if you commit to Railings and realise six months in that you should have gone with Hague Blue?

Both groups seem to be waiting for the permission that Mark Hood describes: permission from the landlord, the property market, or perhaps some future version of themselves who’ll magically know the right answer. So the walls stay safe.

I’ve lived the renter version of this dilemma more than once.

In my twenties I rented a room in a shared flat in London for five years. The back wall of my bedroom was painted this purpleish-putty colour I didn’t like, but it wasn’t quite offensive enough to complain about. My tenancy agreement stated I couldn’t paint, so I didn’t. I looked at that wall every day for five years, mildly resenting it, yet did nothing. Then, when we all moved out (because our landlord had decided to sell), I had to prove the wall had been that colour when I moved in so I wouldn’t be charged for repainting. It turned out the wall hadn’t originally been purpleish-putty at all, and a previous tenant—maybe two tenants ago—had painted it without permission. I could have repainted it any time and it wouldn’t have mattered. I just never asked.

In my first Manchester apartment I left the walls white again and, now, five years into this living in our current rental, I’ve done the same thing. Different homes, same pattern. The walls are white this time, which is infinitely easier to live with than purpleish-putty, but I’m designing around future constraints, because now I know I can paint the walls, I just don’t want the hassle of painting them back to white when we leave.

“The Beige-Free Zone only happens when people consciously choose to design for their present life rather than a future scenario,” says Mark Hood, which feels uncomfortably close to home.

I recently spent some time diving into the world of YesColours, a B-Corp paint brand that does something unique but wonderful: they organise their entire palette by feeling rather than colour. Instead of “Magnolia 4” or “Warm Grey 2,” their collections are grouped by emotional accents such as Fresh, Friendly, Joyful, Mellow, Secluded, Dirty, and Serene.

The question they’re asking their customers isn’t “what colour do you want?”, it’s “how do you want to feel in this room?”

When I take that approach with my home office, I know exactly how I want it to feel: a sanctuary for deep work and focus, but warm enough for the reading nook in the corner (currently a lilac corduroy beanbag that was meant to be temporary seating solution, but over a year later has turned out to be far more comfortable than I’d imagined!). White supports that perfectly well.

But knowing how you want to feel and committing to a colour that expresses that feeling are two different acts. YesColours makes the first part easier—I know I’m drawn to their Secluded, Dirty, Loving, and Nostalgic collections (warm, creamy, muted tones)—but actually painting those colours on the walls means declaring that this is how I want to feel in this room, possibly for the next five years, or however long we’re here. And if I get it wrong, I’m living with that mistake, or I’m repainting, which in a rental means eventually repainting back to white anyway.

Colour is only one element in curating how you want a space to feel though, and it’s not always the most significant one. A few years ago I started working with Manchester-based interior studio Jolie, and their approach—designing sensory journeys and spaces that engage all the senses rather than just what you see—has significantly changed how I think about rooms. The way colour interacts with texture, scent, light, and temperature matters more than any individual choice in isolation.

Which means choosing a wall colour isn’t a simple aesthetic decision. It’s choosing how that colour will interact with the morning light, with the scent of whatever candle I’m burning, with the texture of the rug, the Tylko units and the beanbag. It’s choosing how it’ll feel when I’m working versus when I’m reading versus when I’m doing Pilates.

I’ve curated every other element in my office carefully, but I’ve left the walls white because colour is the one element I can’t easily change if I get it wrong, or if the feeling I want shifts, or if we move in a year and I have to paint it all back anyway. White is safe and flexible. White lets everything else do the work.

The white walls aren’t an isolated decision. They’re part of a broader pattern in how I approach permanence.

My husband’s office has always smelled like Atlas Cedar (or, more specifically, Earl of East’s Atlas Cedar). He first encountered that scent profile on holiday in Marrakech years ago, before we moved in together, and he’s been seeking out those same woody, warm notes ever since. When we attended a candle-making workshop just before Christmas, he sought to recreate it for himself. He knows exactly what he wants his space to smell like, and he sticks with it.

I, on the other hand, have a collection of candles I rotate throughout the year. Some are gifts (perks of being a design blogger), but I don’t burn them indiscriminately. I have favourites, seasonal preferences, scent profiles I return to, which are typically a blend of woody, creamy, sensual fragrances with slight gourmand top notes, and I switch them out depending on the season. White walls, and rotating scents. I’ve built an environment where I can adjust the atmosphere whenever I want without committing to anything permanent.

I’ve been reading—or more accurately, flipping through—two books lately, which is probably its own form of avoidance. Creating a New Home in Mallorca** by Malene Birger is a £75 tome from teNeues: 600m² of historic Felanitx property renovated between 2022 and 2024, photographed in that particular quality of Mallorquín light that makes every surface look both ancient and deliberate. It sits on my Tylko unit for the moments when I need to escape into someone else’s total commitment to a vision. Because that’s what it is, essentially, a document of decisive execution. Malene knew what she wanted and she did it.

And then there’s Home for Now**, which doesn’t assume you want to make a permanent choice at all. The case studies show people who bypassed the whole question and just started; they made choices, lived with them, and adapted when needed. They treated their rented spaces as their homes for right now, rather than waiting rooms for later. And still, pretty much all of them have white walls, with personality coming entirely through furniture, textiles, and the accumulated evidence of a life lived in a space. It’s the same with Malene Birger’s Mallorcan farmhouse, so perhaps I’ve been researching my way toward a conclusion I’d already reached. Mark Hood told me that what Resi’s clients want is for “their home to reflect their identity rather than serve as a neutral holding space.” I don’t think my white walls are neutral anymore; they’re evidence of a choice I keep remaking every day I don’t paint.

The nagging issue is that “well enough” grates against my identity as someone who cares deeply about design. I think a part of me wants to paint because I can appreciate how the right colour could make it all feel completely put together, finally finished, in a way that the white just isn’t doing for me, or I wouldn’t keep dwelling on it. But I know I won’t, because for me the trade-off doesn’t justify itself in a rental where I’m spending money on paint I’ll have to cover over later, and where painting one wall would only make me more aware of the orangey wood door and white plastic light switch I can’t change.

Maybe the question isn’t whether you can paint your rental, or even whether you should. It’s whether painting would actually change how you use the space, and whether it would make you more aware of everything you can’t change, or less. Whether you’re designing for how you live now, or for some future version of this room you haven’t moved into yet.

And most honestly: whether white walls actually bother you, or whether they’re just supposed to.

This post contains products that have been gifted to me, and affiliate links which I earn commission through, at no additional cost to you. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own. All photography © Kate Baxter.

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On waking too hot.

kate — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

3am alertness arrives without warning, a switch thrown somewhere in the body’s circuitry, and by the time I’ve registered it, I’m already fully conscious, my heart pounding steady, mind unhelpfully clear.

This is not the blurred waking of a noise in the street or a dog’s bark from downstairs, it’s something internal. The stickiness comes next. The slow realisation, as wakefulness settles, that I am attached to the mattress in a way that was not true when I fell asleep. My chest, the back of my neck, the strip of skin where my vest meets waistband, all of it, damp. I lie very still for a moment, as though stillness might negotiate with the heat. It doesn’t. The wave rises anyway—that’s the only word for it, a wave—and negotiation ends.

I peel myself free and take a few steps forward in the darkness, towards the bathroom, groping for the door handle in the approximate place I know it to be and find air, then more air, then the slightly lower position it has always actually occupied. I do this every time. Some part of my brain has simply decided that the handle lives six inches higher than it does, and no quantity of nocturnal corrections has persuaded it otherwise.

In the bathroom, the window is already open. I left it that way on purpose, the kind of forward-planning that perimenopause has made second nature. A cool flannel within reach. A spare vest hanging on the back of the door, placed there the previous evening with the resigned practicality of someone who knows what’s coming.

The cool air is immediate and kind. I sit in the near-dark. Near dark, because our neighbour appears to have converted their garden floodlight from motion-sensitive to simply always on, at some point in the past year, without apparent reason or remorse. It angles directly into our bathroom window. I have come to think of it as a minor antagonist in the ongoing project of getting enough sleep: just as the heat retreats and drowsiness might, theoretically, begin its return, there is the light, white and insistent, completing the work of waking me that the body began. I resent it every single time with a consistency I find almost admirable.

I wipe myself down with the damp flannel. The cooling as the sweat evaporates is not, it turns out, simply relief, instead it’s a brief sequence of tiny stinging points, a flash of goosebumps rising across my chest and arms before the temperature settles. The body reversing course with the same bluntness with which it overshot. I pull the spare vest over my head, drop the damp one on the floor, and pad back to bed.

There is an art to re-entering a bed you have sweated through. It involves a quick assessment of the fitted sheet and finding the driest available quadrant and angling towards it. Flipping the pillow to the cold side, which will remain cold for approximately forty-five seconds before equalising to room temperature, but those forty-five seconds are a welcome relief.

Sleep, on these nights, does not return quickly. It reconstitutes itself slowly, reluctantly, and often incompletely. My husband remains sleeping beside me, untroubled. My mind, unhelpfully alert, considers various topics it has no business raising at this hour.

This is my cycle now or, at least, this particular expression of it. The nights that coincide with the heavier days of my period are reliably worse, and I’ve come to recognise the pattern well enough to anticipate it, even if anticipation doesn’t do much to soften the reality. Perimenopause has been, among other things, a lesson in the gap between knowing what’s happening and being able to do anything useful about it.

I’ve read a great deal on the subject over the past two or three years, wading through the conflicting advice and passionate advocates for particular interventions. I’ve started paying attention to what I wear, what I eat in the evenings, whether the room is cool enough before I get into bed. Small variables, adjusted and monitored with the mild obsessiveness of someone who doesn’t want to feel this way but also can’t continue doing nothing.

The duvet question.

The duvet has been on the list for a while. The bamboo duvet I’ve been using the past few years was working, until it wasn’t, or perhaps until the symptoms outpaced it. I’d been looking at options designed specifically for temperature regulation and had gone some way down the rabbit hole of the Scandinavian approach: two single duvets on a double bed, each person regulating their own temperature independently, no negotiation required. It was something I first researched back in 2020, when I first started writing about perimenopause and sleep, in a post about sustainable bedroom updates that turned, somewhat inevitably, into an early dispatch from this particular territory. My husband, to his credit, was entirely open to the idea then and remains so now. The obstacle was not him.

It was the duvet covers. I have a considerable collection of linen ones—all doubles—accumulated over years, in an array of colours that I love to mix and match. Single duvet covers, I discovered when I looked into it properly, tend to come in designs that are either aimed at children or at people whose relationship with their bedroom aesthetics differs significantly from mine. The Scandinavian solution, so elegant in principle, would have required retiring an entire cupboard’s worth of covers I have no intention of retiring.

I’ve also started questioning the linen itself. For most of my adult life I’ve been drawn to its weight, its texture, and the way it softens and improves with washing. But linen breathes differently from cotton, and I’ve found myself wondering, on the longer, stickier nights, whether pure cotton might serve this particular season of my life better.

A few weeks ago, Simba got in touch about their Hybrid Duvet**, a product I’d already been looking at it and considering. The duvet utilises Stratos technology on the upper layer, and is designed to draw heat away and keep the surface cooler, with a filling made from recycled PET fibres. The brand is B Corp certified, and the double retails at £199; a considered investment, but not inaccessible.

The duvet arrived this week and has already made its way onto the bed. We slept under it for the first time last night and I was pleasantly surprised with how weighty and reassuring it felt, whilst still feeling crisp and cool to the touch. It holds its shape far more rigidly than the bamboo duvet, and delivers a rather pleasing crinkling noise as you gather it around your body, reminiscent of those sturdy duvets you find in high-end hotel chains.

Whether it will hold its own against the 3am heat remains to be seen. I’ll post an update here in a few months.

This post is in collaboration with Simba, who have gifted me a Hybrid duvet for review. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own. I’ll update this piece once I’ve used the duvet properly over time. All photography © Kate Baxter.

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Coffee & Conversations: Phoebe & Isobel of Project Pico.

kate — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:52:21 +0000

I can’t remember how I first came across Pico Goods.

I think it was originally through one of their online stockists, probably Nadinoo, and I know that I followed their beautiful Instagram account for a number of years before it was cruelly and unceremoniously deactivated by Meta (more on that later). I was originally drawn in by the simplicity of their soft organic cotton underwear, the kind that I feel every cool-girl-in-the-know would wear, eshewing frills and adornment for casual effortless nonchalance. The pieces, in aesthetic, are the same as every ubiquitous underwear brand, yet they differentiate themselves through their cut, quality and impressive commitment to full traceability back to source.

That’s something worth investing in, in my opinion. Behind the Pico brand are two women building a clothing business from kitchen tables in two different countries; Phoebe works from home in England, Isobel from a small studio in Portugal. They connect through screens, voice notes, and that sacred intimacy that comes from having known one another since school, and trusting their ability to build something slow and unglamorous together.

What they’re building sounds simple until you understand what complete traceability actually means. It’s not about certification stamps or vague supplier lists, but working intimately with farmer co-operatives, visiting ginning units, and working with the same factory manager (Girish) they met on their first research trip to India in 2016. It’s about understanding which natural dyes come from which artisan, how soap nuts wash ecru fabric without bleaching, and why you can see tiny flecks of the cotton plant if you look closely at the finished fabric. This level of knowledge isn’t directly scalable, and requires the kind of attention that only comes from staying deliberately, perhaps a little awkwardly, small.

Of course, they didn’t set out to be small. They set out to understand—truly understand—where their clothes came from, with the same traceability they’d come to expect from food. Isobel had studied tailoring at London College of Fashion, worked on film sets, used sustainable materials and natural dyes, but could never trace organic fibres right back to their source. Phoebe, with a history degree from Goldsmiths and a background in events, had grown up wearing her mother’s eclectic collection of vintage clothes and had written her thesis on the hazards of crinolines. When they moved in together after university, they started growing vegetables, talking endlessly about the world, fashion, farming, and kept circling back to the same question: why didn’t they know about their clothes the way they knew about their food?

Underwear became the answer. They couldn’t find organic cotton underwear on the market that met both their ethical requirements and had the design aesthetic they felt was essential for people to truly value this type of everyday item. It was “essential, close to our skin, intimate and one of the items of clothing that we need, and has high function,” as Phoebe describes it, something you need rather than want, wouldn’t buy secondhand and, they believed, needed making properly. And, she adds with characteristic understatement, “we like a challenge.”

A trip to India in 2016 changed everything. Phoebe and Isobel spent two weeks in Dehradun on Dr Vandana Shiva’s farm, studying Gandhi, globalisation, and Gross National Happiness, which seems like a somewhat unusual curriculum for two women in their twenties trying to understand cotton. In their final interview before leaving, Dr Shiva offered advice that has shaped everything since: “start small and keep holding hands.”

They took her sat her word, and what followed involved travelling practically the entire perimeter of India by train, “eyes wide open, being tested and stretched” at every turn. They met artisans and visited dye recycling units, jumping between industrial and artisan supply chains, trying to find a way to produce jersey fabric—which sits firmly in industrial systems—whilst staying connected to everyone along the way. The challenge was immense. Most farmers work one hectare of land, operating within large co-operatives. How do you maintain relationships at that scale when you’re two people with no factory, no infrastructure, no established supply chain?

Then they met Girish, the factory manager they’ve worked with ever since, who had a small factory sewing organic and fairtrade garments for small brands. He didn’t feel like a supplier; he felt like someone who understood what they were trying to do. Eight years later, “he increasingly feels like a partner in Pico rather than a contractor,” and that distinction matters enormously to them. The supply chain they established on that first trip has remained remarkably consistent: the same knitting unit, the same core relationships, though they’ve woven in different natural dyers and co-operatives as they’ve learned more.

Recently, they’ve been working closely with Swaminathan from KASKOM as part of a two-year research project with UAL and the British Council. The goal is to produce fully compostable underwear using indigenous Karunganni cotton, by working directly with a small cluster of just eight farmers. It’s work that “has really refuelled us and sparked all the intentions of why we began Pico,” Phoebe says, “being able to connect with individual farmers, and work with fibre that’s better for soil, for farmers, and for the planet than even long-staple organic cotton. There’s more to come from all of this work, but it feels really positive to be still making steps forward into producing a truly regenerative pair of pants.“

Regenerative, not just sustainable, is a distinction that matters. They’re not trying to do less harm; they’re trying to actively improve the soil, livelihoods, basically the entire system. It’s ambitious work for a business run from kitchen tables, but perhaps that’s precisely why it’s possible, because they’re not answerable to investors demanding scale or growth metrics that would make this kind of patient, relationship-based work impossible.

When Phoebe and Isobel talk about traceability, they don’t simply mean a certificate or a supplier audit report. They mean being able to tell you that your organic cotton knickers come from farmer co-operatives called Pratima and Pratibha, and that the cotton goes to a specific ginning unit where seeds are separated from the boll, then to a spinning unit, before heading to a knitting unit close to Girish and his factory.

The undyed natural ecru fabric is washed using soap nuts, which means no bleaching and no synthetic detergents. If you look closely at the finished fabric, you can see a natural fleck, a visible trace of the cotton plant itself. It’s the kind of detail that would be usually be edited out in industrial production, smoothed away in pursuit of perfection. But for Pico, it’s proof of origin.

The charcoal-dyed pieces are coloured using Oeko-Tex certified dye in a unit that recycles everything. The dye water runs through pools that function as solar panels, powering the process. The five per cent that can’t be recycled gets used for building materials. Some pieces are dyed by Kumar, a friend of Girish’s, using natural plant dyes. The supply chain isn’t uniform—it shifts slightly depending on colour, on what’s being made—but every variation is known, chosen, and understood.

At Girish’s factory, Mila, a small team of around eight people cut patterns, sew, and press. Then the finished pants travel across the sea (currently by plane, which is a limitation they’re honest about wanting to change but can’t justify with their small quantities) to their fulfilment centre where Tegan sorts and packs each order.

This level of specificity isn’t marketing copy: it’s the actual structure of their business. They’re not scaling towards automation or efficiency; they’re deepening relationships with the people and processes they already know. It’s the kind of work that makes no sense in conventional business terms. The margins are smaller, the complexity higher, with scalability non-existent. But Phoebe and Isobel aren’t trying to build a conventional business, they’re trying to prove that you can make everyday essentials—things people actually need—in a way that honours every person and process involved.

In 2023, Meta permanently deleted Pico’s Instagram account: over 16,000 followers, years of work—connections with makers and designers who supported each other online and offline—all gone in an instant. They posted about it on their original, dormant Instagram account, thinking they’d rebuild there, but Meta deleted that one too. To this day, they don’t know why.

“I think we were instantly devastated and panicked that our business would not survive without it,” Phoebe says. Like many small businesses, they’d come to believe their survival depended on Instagram. “There was always a big pressure to post and share what we were doing, but in truth it never came very naturally to us.“

Then they discovered something unexpected: most of their customers were loyal ones who perhaps didn’t even look at their Instagram. The business kept going, orders still came through, and after a while, the panic subsided into curious liberation.

“In some ways it was a relief. We both struggled with Instagram a lot. It didn’t always, or often didn’t, feel that healthy. It took up a lot of time and thought, and this might be one of the reasons why we haven’t taken it back up again.” The deletion forced a question they’d been avoiding: did they actually want to be on social media, or did they just feel they had to be?

But the reality isn’t quite that simple, and they recognise there are people they’d love to share Pico with who are no longer seeing them, and those who might think the brand doesn’t exist anymore. Phoebe misses “the random opportunities and ideas that might pop into your inbox, or an amazing artist or designer who might reach out to collaborate, or whose work you stumble upon.” There’s a feeling of being disconnected from a community that primarily communicates through platforms they’re no longer part of. “Maybe in some ways we feel a bit separate,” Phoebe acknowledges, “but all the more reason why we need to and are trying to connect with people and brands directly and see where that takes us.” It’s fitting, really, for a business built on direct relationships with farmers and factory managers rather than scalable systems, but this kind of slow, relationship-based work has its costs.

“Maybe it’s not the best one,” Phoebe says when asked about the unglamorous truth of running a small business, “but it took us so many years before Pico could even pay us a minimum wage. We were both juggling jobs as cleaners, gardeners, nannies, you name it, so that we could run our own business.” At one point, they were fitting Pico work around other people’s schedules and needs, scheduling meetings for midnight and packing pants until the early hours, which is often the unvarnished reality of building something that can’t be rushed, won’t compromise, and takes time to find its people.

They’re both working from home now, juggling small children—four between them—all under the age of three. They may be in different countries but technology affords them constant contact, and they still manage to meet in person regularly. When they started, they were both involved in every aspect of Pico. In some ways, perhaps they still are, but their roles have evolved. Isobel focuses more on design, brand, and production, while Phoebe handles sales and marketing, though she describes her role as “more creative director.“

So, how do they prevent burnout when they’re so close to the work, so personally invested, and stretched thin between children and the complexity of what they’re trying to build? “We both have incredible partners who help with the kids and families who are always so supportive,” says Phoebe. “We also have a mutual understanding of running a business with kids, so we can take the weight for each other if we need to. This doesn’t mean burn out or exhaustion doesn’t creep in at times, but we do our best. We want to make sure we are there and present for our little ones too.”

Rest, when it comes, looks different for each of them. For Phoebe, it’s walking in the woods, getting in the sea, sitting around a fire with friends or family, her women’s circle, and singing in nature, a newfound love. When none of that feels possible with young children around, “simply a good book and a bath and bed,” does the trick. She’s just read ‘The Brotherless Night’ about the Sri Lankan civil war, which was “incredible but heart-wrenching,” she says.

For Isobel, it’s walking in the beautiful woods and hillside near their home in Portugal, alongside time in the studio to create or make something for her kids or friends, usually by knitting or sewing. She’s also been attending a yoga class with Ana, her youngest, once a week, which she describes as “a moment for them both to pause in the busyness of two little ones and all the other juggles of life.”

When I ask about key decisions which stand out in their journey to date, Phoebe immediately says “trusting and working with Girish and a small factory, and not trying to be something we weren’t; acknowledging we are small, starting small and doing our best.”

What she’d change is harder to articulate, because it’s not a specific decision but a state of being: “having more confidence in what we were doing.” She’s quick to add that confidence isn’t something that just happens; it has to come from you, as part of the journey. “When starting out we were nervous of even calling ourselves a business. We didn’t want to be part of the capitalist system, but the more and more we have evolved I feel confident we are trying to do business differently. We are continually trying to improve, and ultimately we all need pants, so let’s keep trying to do it the best way we can.“

So, what do they hope people feel when they choose Pico? “I hope that they feel and can see the quality and care, that they can resonate with the value and the story of their everyday item, that there is beauty in the simple things.“

I, for one, deeply connect with that.

PICO

What they make: Organic cotton underwear with complete supply chain traceability from seed to finished garment
Based: Founders in England and Portugal; production in India
Founded: 2016
Website: project-pico.com
Instagram: n/a

All imagery © Pico & respective photographers, used with permission.

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The art of intentional gift giving.

kate — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:32:54 +0000

Right, let’s be honest about something: gift-giving at Christmas often feels more like obligation than desire, doesn’t it?

Especially at the end of what’s been, for most freelancers I know (myself included), a financially tighter year than we’d hoped. Which is precisely why I’ve approached this year’s thoughtful gift guide differently. There’s this persistent pressure to find the “perfect gift” for everyone on your list, to spend money you can’t really spare, all in service of… what exactly? Performing festive generosity? Ticking boxes? Making sure no one feels left out?

My close friends and I abandoned traditional Christmas gift exchanges years ago, which was honestly such a relief. We’re scattered now—different cities, different lives—and what we realised was that pooling whatever money we might have spent on gifts towards actually being together felt infinitely more valuable. A moment in time where we’re all back in the same place, having a proper catch-up over good wine, with nobody rushing off too soon. That’s become our version of festive generosity (whether we actually manage to coordinate a date close to Christmas or not!), and it suits us perfectly.

So, here’s what I want to propose with this year’s guide: forget Christmas for a moment.

Or rather, stop thinking about these as specifically Christmas gifts that need to be purchased and wrapped and given on a specific date in December. Instead, think of this as year-round inspiration – for birthdays (which feel so much more personal anyway), for treating yourself when you have a bit of spare cash (because you deserve it), or simply for bookmarking ideas for future you to make life a little easier.

Because the whole commercialisation of Christmas rather misses the point, doesn’t it?

For someone who isn’t religious, the value of this season—for me at least—is spending time with the people I love. Winter is dismal enough, especially in the UK, so festive cheer is genuinely needed. It just shouldn’t come bundled with crippling financial pressure and the anxiety of getting it all “right.”

What I’m suggesting here are gifts that serve beyond a single day: making your home cosier and warmer (not just for Christmas), finding grounding rituals and new hobbies that will sustain you well into the new year, and planning slow and intentional trips somewhere; whether that’s next month or several years away because you need to save. These are investments in quality of life, not just things to unwrap.

Something I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve got older, is that traditionally “cliché” gifts like good socks, beautiful candles, fancy preserves, proper slippers, watercolour sets and carefully chosen books, endure for a reason. They add genuine value. They’re not flashy, they’re often quite practical, but they bring either joy or ease (ideally both) to the recipient’s daily life.

The best gift I received recently was a large pink book (yes, that one, the Sofia Coppola Archive) that my husband bought me for my birthday back in February. I’d had it on my wishlist for ages but hadn’t bought it myself because there’s always something more sensible to spend £50 on. But I absolutely love it. Just seeing it on the shelf brings me joy, and flicking through the pages inspires something new each time. It’s the only thing he got me for my birthday (he’d only just given me an engagement ring and we were getting married in the summer), and to some people, having “only” £50 spent on them might seem measly. But the fact that he remembered I wanted it, and saw the value it would add to my life? That’s what truly matters.

Growing up, my parents would get my sister and me one “big” gift and then a few smaller things – CDs, books, that sort of thing. It felt generous without being excessive. But scrolling through social media now, it seems parents spend absolutely insane amounts on their children at Christmas; sheer mountains of things that so often end up unappreciated, in landfill, or dumped at charity shops come January. The whole commercial machine has spiralled completely out of control, imho.

So here’s my gentle pushback: gifts don’t need to be flashy or numerous or expensive to be meaningful. They need to be considered. They need to show you’ve paid attention.

The three categories in this gift guide—the Slow Traveller, the Intentional Homebody, the Ritual Keeper—aren’t arbitrary. They reflect how I actually live and what genuinely brings me (and people I know) lasting pleasure. Not aspirational fantasy (although some things are on the pricey side), but practical beauty. Things that make ordinary days feel a bit more special.

Use these gift suggestions however serves you best. Bookmark something for a friend’s birthday in March. Treat yourself to that beautiful mug you’ve been eyeing when you get paid for that project. Start a wishlist for a trip you’re dreaming about, even if it’s years away. There’s absolutely no rule that says these ideas must be actioned in December.

My only real advice would be ruthlessly honest about what you can actually manage this season, both financially and emotionally. If the thought of Christmas shopping fills you with dread, that’s valuable information. Scale back. Focus on fewer people, or skip it entirely if that’s what feels right. There’s no prize for martyring yourself at the altar of festive obligation.

But if seeking out the perfect thing for someone you genuinely care about brings you joy? Then lean into that. Just do it with intention rather than panic, and perhaps outside the pressure cooker of December if you can.

Now then, shall we look at some genuinely lovely things?

Thoughtful gift guide 2025

The Slow Traveller

For those who choose the scenic route.

The gifts I’ve gathered here are for people who pack light but with intention, who believe the journey matters as much as the destination, and who find genuine romance in departure boards and platform farewells. These aren’t fussy travel gadgets that promise to “revolutionise” your experience – I’ve always been suspicious of solutions to problems I didn’t know I had. Instead, they’re thoughtful additions that make the act of travelling feel more considered, more comfortable, more yours.

Some are practical – because there’s nothing romantic about realising your carefully selected outfit is hopelessly creased when you arrive, or that your hotel room curtains have apparently never met a sunrise they didn’t want to share with you. Others are about creating small rituals: the perfect notebook for capturing observations from a café window, watercolours for sketching an afternoon plaza, a refillable scent balm that will forever remind you of that particular trip.

I love items that work just as beautifully for a solo city break as they do for couples travelling together; the stainless steel lunch box for picnics assembled from market finds, the oversized cashmere wrap that doubles as a blanket on chilly evening trains, and beautifully designed playing cards for lazy afternoons in hotel bars when it’s too hot to venture out.

1. GESTALTEN ‘Epic Train Journeys’* 2. BLACK+BLUM stainless steel lunch box 3. HAY waffle texture bath robe* 4. WOLF+BADGER big leather jewellery box* 5. CEDAR ‘Centre’ travel tin candle 6. GROWN ALCHEMIST on-the-go essentials kit* 7. RISE&FALL oversized cashmere wrap 8. MARIMEKKO Vilja Marimerkki cosmetic bag 9. ROMAN SZMAL Urban Sketchers watercolours half pan 10. ALWAYS SUNDAY Eames playing cards 11. TOPOLOGIE woven phone strap* 12. TENTH MUSE refillable scent balm 13. SCRIBBLE&. travel journal 14. THE SCHOOL OF LIFE Travel Therapy cards 15. BEDFOLK cashmere socks 16. JACKSON’S set of 4 travel brushes 17. ATTIRECARE Crease Release 18. NUDIENT Bold cabin bag 19. PICO low rise knickers 20. KINTO ‘day off’ tumbler 21. HAY ‘Outline’ cotton sleep mask* 22. STEAMERY Cirrus 3 hand steamer 23. OCTAEVO travel notebooks 24. AESOP Ginger Flight Therapy* 25. COMME DES GARÇONS classic wallet* 26. SUMMER FRIDAYS Jet Lag eye masks* 27. ÖLEND padded laptop sleeve* 28. ANTLER packing cubes*

The Intentional Homebody

For those who stay in by choice.

I’ve never been someone who needs to fill every weekend with plans. A free Saturday with nothing scheduled except maybe a wander to a nice café, then home to potter about? That’s genuinely exciting to me in a way that packed social calendars never have been. I know this isn’t everyone’s idea of living well – there’s always been this underlying suggestion that staying in means missing out – but I’ve never experienced it that way. If anything, I think I’m protecting something quite precious: the ability to genuinely enjoy my own company, in my own space.

We rent, which comes with its own limitations—you can’t knock through walls or repaint everything on a whim—but I’ve discovered there’s a particular kind of creativity required in making a rented house feel like yours. Small updates with big impact, like a beautiful throw draped over the sofa, handmade ceramics that make your morning coffee feel like a ritual rather than refuelling, and proper linen that transforms your bedroom into somewhere you actually want to spend time.

These gifts are for people who’ve made an art form of staying in, who see their homes as ongoing projects rather than finished products, and who understand that “homebody” isn’t code for “boring” – it’s a deliberate choice about where you want to invest your energy and resources.

I’m always drawn to items that sit at the intersection of beautiful and functional: the kind of things you use daily but also genuinely enjoy looking at. Wooden salad servers that live on your kitchen counter because they’re too lovely to hide in a drawer. A portable lamp you can move from room to room depending on where you’re settling for the evening. Coffee table books about design that actually get opened and referenced, not just displayed for guests who never visit. And yes, this extends to items for pets too – because if you’re sharing your carefully curated space with a dog, why shouldn’t their bowl be as considered as your crockery?

1. RYLAND PETERS SMALL ‘Bring the Outside In’* by Abi Dare 2. &TRADITION Flowerpot portable lamp* 3. ATT PYNTA carved wood salad servers 4. ARTISTS&OBJECTS ‘With you, under candlelight’ woodcut print 5. ELVANG Basket throw 6. DAMSON MADDER Harlequin oven glove 7. HAY Barro butter dish 8. OUR CURATED ABODE salt & pepper grinder 9. ARCTIC FOX & CO. cosy socks 10. MAEGEN Cafetière embroidered napkins 11. BRUTES Asa mug 12. MARIMEKKO Pieni Unikko tea towels 13. CRAIGHILL match holder 14. SERVICE PROJECTS ice cream cup 15. DIPTYQUE multi-service cleaner* 16. NEW WORKS Pleat pitcher 17. GUNIA PROJECT Promin soy candle 18. AVOLT power extension lead 19. GESTALTEN ‘Designed to Stay’ The Design Hotels Book 20. HKLIVING set of 3 cheese knives 21. RISE&FALL velvet quilt 22. KEYNVOR coffee & croissant candle set 23. COLOURS OF ARLEY pet steps 24. HAY dog bowl

The Ritual Keeper

For those who resist the rush

I’ve never been naturally good at slowing down. My default setting has always been to fill every moment with productivity, to feel vaguely guilty about time spent doing “nothing.” But over the past few years—partly through necessity, partly through deliberate practice—I’ve come to understand that rituals aren’t indulgent, they’re essential. The difference between merely existing and actually living often comes down to these small, repeated moments of attention.

Morning coffee made properly in a French press and sipped whilst doing the Wordle—I’m not quite patient enough for the crossword yet!—rather than gulped while checking emails. An evening bath with decent salts, not just a functional shower. Actually settling down in an armchair to read rather than scrolling through your phone in bed. These aren’t grand gestures, but they do require a kind of gentle resistance against the constant pressure to be doing something productive.

The gifts here are for people who’ve made peace with moving at their own pace, who choose the tangible over the digital whenever possible, and who understand that investing in the infrastructure of daily life—the good pyjamas, the proper pen, the beautiful mug that makes your morning coffee taste better somehow—isn’t frivolous, it’s sustaining.

Right now I’m especially drawn to items that encourage you to be fully present for whatever you’re doing, like the jigsaw puzzle that requires patience and attention, and the fountain pen that slows your writing down in a way that somehow makes your thoughts clearer. These are deliberate counterweights to the speed and superficiality that dominates so much of modern life.

Because the small, repeated moments? They’re often the ones that matter most.

1. TOAST Forte stripe flannel pyjamas 2. TEN PM The Night Drink 3. KURATAKE Japanese watercolour large pan 4. ELLIOT’S Weekend Recipes cookbook 5. REOME Skin Ceremony kit* 6. THE CONRAN SHOP Hemisphere match box 7. MAISON LOUIS MARIE No. 04 Bois de Balincourt body oil 8. ANNA+NINA ‘Offline’ mug 9. KAWECO Honey fountain pen 10. NISHIGUCHI KUTSUSHITA wool jacquard socks 11. EDE ‘Press Pause’ roll-on therapist 12. POLLEN Croissant Butter 13. KARST Joy planner 14. PPP LAB hand-pinched stoneware incense holder 15. HOMEWORK ‘Wood’ bath salts 16. LONDON NOOTROPICS adaptogen coffee gift box 17. TOAST sheepskin hot water bottle cover 18. ABE JAPAN canvas home shoes 19. PAPIER ‘Lobster’ 1000 piece jigsaw 20. SCHOOL OF LIFE Arts & Ideas collection 21. MICHI Kyoto Hoijicha tea* 22. THE CONRAN SHOP Milos chess set*

Lead image © Ferm Living

The post The art of intentional gift giving. appeared first on Fabric of my Life..

Budapest in 3 days: an honest first-timer’s guide.

kate — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 09:43:51 +0000

Planning a trip to Budapest? Here’s what actually works, what’s overrated and what I wish I’d known before I went.

I spent three days in Hungary’s capital on a press trip with Jet2 and Visit Budapest, which meant someone else did all the planning.

Surprisingly, this turned out to be one of the best ways to see the city — no agonising over which ruin bar was “too touristy” or which restaurant was “still undiscovered.” Sometimes surrender is its own kind of wisdom.

If you’re looking for specific information, you can use the links below to jump to the relevant section of the post:

Is Budapest worth visiting?

The Grand Budapest Hotel connection

Getting to Budapest

Where to stay

Where to eat

Traditional Hungarian cuisine
Contemporary Hungarian cuisine

Coffee culture

Cocktails & nightlife

What to see

Buda side: the Castle District
Danube river cruise
Pest side: Parliament and Basilica
The Jewish Quarter
Hungarian State Opera House
City Park (Liget)

Museums I didn’t visit (but would next time)

Thermal baths: choose wisely

What to read: the perfect coffee stop companion

Practical information

How long do you need in Budapest?

Final verdict

→ Want to understand the deeper story of Budapest: the weight of its history, the tension between preservation and reinvention? Read my reflective travel essay about my three days in Budapest.

Is Budapest worth visiting?

Yes, emphatically. Budapest is affordable, beautiful and layered with the kind of history that makes you think differently about Europe. Three days is enough to fall for the city, though not enough to see everything. If you’re looking for a city break that feels substantial without being exhausting, Budapest delivers.

Who it’s for: People who want architectural beauty that tells stories and excellent food without extortionate prices. Travellers who appreciate complexity over simplicity, who want to understand why a city is the way it is, not just see its highlights. Solo travellers will find it manageable and safe, with enough café culture to never feel truly alone.

Who it’s not for: If you’re primarily interested in shopping, prefer big modern city experiences over historical depth, or aren’t drawn to getting under the skin of a place, Budapest might not be your first choice. This is a city that rewards curiosity about history, architecture and the layers beneath the surface.

Budget reality: Budapest is significantly cheaper than Western European capitals, but it’s not as cheap as it was five years ago. Expect £100-150 per day comfortably (excluding accommodation). Mid-range hotels run £80-120 per night.

The Grand Budapest Hotel connection

Many visitors come to Budapest expecting to find Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. They won’t; the film wasn’t shot here and isn’t set here. But the world of the film, inspired by Stefan Zweig’s writings about Central European café society and the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, absolutely resonates in Budapest’s grand cafés and ornate architecture.

The fictional hotel’s grand facade even echoes that of the Gellért Hotel, a 1918 Art Nouveau landmark designed by Hungarian architects Ármin Hegedűs, Artúr Sebestyén and Izidor Sterk that sits of the west bank of the Danube. Like the Grand Budapest, the Gellért hosted royals, artists and dignitaries in its pre-war glory and suffered through decades of communist-era decline into Soviet-style functionality before eventual restoration.

The hotel is currently closed, undergoing transformation by the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, with reopening scheduled for 2027, but if you loved the film’s aesthetic of faded imperial grandeur you’ll also find echoes of it in:

Hungarian Parliament – that massive neo-Gothic structure, especially stunning from the Danube cruise
Gerbeaud Café – that particular elegance of early 20th-century café culture
New York Café – ornate, gilded, the kind of place that appears in “most beautiful cafés in the world” lists
Hungarian State Opera House – neo-Renaissance with Baroque elements, every surface decorated
St. Stephen’s Hall – meticulous 19th-century excess, rebuilt to its former glory

The film captures something true about this part of Europe; the weight of lost empire, the persistence of beauty despite destruction and the way elegance and tragedy coexist. Budapest embodies that, even if it’s not literally where Anderson filmed.

Getting to Budapest

We flew from Manchester Airport on a Friday evening — smooth, affordable, and timed to arrive around 10pm, ready for a full weekend of exploring. If you’re in the UK, Jet2 offers well-curated Budapest packages with flights and hotels bundled together, which simplifies planning considerably.

Where to stay

We stayed at Hotel Vision Budapest, one of Jet2holidays’ Budapest hotels with a grand facade overlooking the Danube, and views that made you understand immediately why this city is built around the river. The location worked well for accessing both Buda and Pest sides of the city.

Buda vs Pest: Buda (castle side) is hillier, quieter, more residential. Pest (flat side) is where most restaurants and nightlife are. For a first visit, I’d recommend staying in Pest near the river as this gives you easy access to everything. The city is walkable for most sightseeing but remember to bring comfortable shoes, as there are cobblestones everywhere!

Where to eat in Budapest

Traditional Hungarian cuisine

IDA

Traditional Austro-Hungarian cuisine in a grandiose setting, with white table linen and a grand piano. Named after the wife of architect Miklós Ybl (who designed half the city’s landmarks).

What to order: Wiener Schnitzel with potato salad — enormous, golden, perfectly executed. Kaiserschmarrn for dessert — order your own, don’t rely on stealing bites from companions. This lightly sweetened pancake, shredded and caramelised, is named after Emperor Franz Joseph I and tastes like something an emperor might eat in private when he just wanted something comforting.

Atmosphere: Elegant without being stiff, locals and tourists mixed

Booking: Recommended, especially for weekend lunches

→Ida Bistro, Ybl Miklós tér 6/1, 1013 Budapest

Gundel

Once among Central Europe’s most prestigious restaurants under Károly Gundel, protégé of César Ritz, Gundel underwent a rebrand post-Covid and now aspires to be a welcoming destination for all, toursits and locals alike, showcasing traditional and seasonal dishes of Hungarian cuisine.

Must order: Mangalica ragout gratin — heritage breed pork slow-cooked until falling apart, baked under cheese crust. Obscenely rich. Follow with Gundel’s palacsinta, a crêpe filled with rum-soaked raisins, walnuts, lemon zest, served with rich chocolate sauce. It’s the restaurant’s most famous dish, for good reason!

Atmosphere: Elegant without being stuffy, traditional without feeling like a museum.
Booking: Recommended, especially weekends

→ Gundel Károly út 4, 1146

Gerbeaud

Operating since 1858 on Vörösmarty Square. High ceilings, chandeliers, marble tables; the particular elegance of early 20th-century café culture. It’s grand but not intimidating, with a mix of tourists treating themselves and locals who’ve been coming here for decades. The pastry case is obscene; rows and rows of cakes, tortes, slices, each one more elaborate than the last. It’s the kind of place where you feel you should sit up straighter, but it’s not so formal that you can’t relax into your coffee.

Essential order: Gerbeaud Slice — layers of walnut and apricot jam between thin pastry, topped with dark chocolate. The same recipe Émile Gerbeaud created: not too sweet, the walnuts providing texture and slight bitterness.

Booking: Not necessary; walk-ins welcome but expect to queue at peak times (weekends, mid-afternoon)

→ Gerbeaud, Vörösmarty tér 7-8, 1051

First Strudel House of Pest

A family-owned restaurant that opened in 2007 with the explicit mission of preserving “the true Hungarian tradition of strudel-making.” They’ve turned preservation into performance: watching someone stretch strudel dough until you can read a newspaper through it is genuinely mesmerising.

What to order: The apple strudel is the safer choice if you’re not a fan of cottage cheese textures. The túró (cottage cheese) strudel is more traditional but divisive; the filling retains that grainy texture that you either love or you don’t.

Honest assessment: The craft is flawless, the demonstration fascinating. But the strudel itself disappointed me. As someone who loves British apple crumble, I found it lacked the cinnamon and warming spices I associate with cooked apples. The restaurant was packed with satisfied customers though, so this is clearly a personal palate issue rather than a quality problem.

→ First Strudel House of Pest, Október 6. u. 22, 1051

Great Market Hall

Built in 1897, with a distinctive Zsolnay-tiled roof in green and gold, this is the largest and oldest indoor market in Budapest. Here you’ll find paprika stalls with rows of red powder in varying intensities, Tokaji wine, Túró Rudi (chocolate-covered cottage cheese bars), Kolbász sausage hanging in loops, salami as thick as your forearm. Oh, and pickled everything! This is where you come for ingredients and food souvenirs rather than a meal, though the upper floor food stalls do serve traditional Hungarian dishes if you’re hungry. Prices are reasonable, but expect some tourist markup compared to neighbourhood markets.

Timing: Weekday mornings are less chaotic; Sunday gets very busy

Contemporary Hungarian cuisine

BIBO

Dani García’s restaurant on the top floor of the Dorothea Hotel is where “Spanish soul meets Hungarian gastronomy,” and where I understood what contemporary Hungarian cuisine could be: not simply preserving tradition, but using it as a starting point for invention.

Standout dishes: The goulash croquette alone justifies the visit, a rich, meaty goulash concentrated inside a croquette ball, breaded and fried to golden perfection. Game-changing. “The foie that wanted to be a cherry” delivered exactly what the name promised: foie gras presented as a cherry with sour cherry compote, whimsy meeting technical showmanship. The krumplis tészta reimagined with paccheri, roasted octopus, soy sabayon, and kimchi paprika pulled from multiple traditions—Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean—and somehow made it work. And the deconstructed strudel with yellow beetroot and orange was better than the traditional version I’d had that afternoon; the beetroot added depth, the orange cut through sweetness in a way apples and pastry alone couldn’t achieve.

Atmosphere: Mirrored surfaces, petrol blue and burnt orange seating, giant glass flowers overhead. Every angle Instagram-ready, plus incredible views over the Danube from the rooftop terrace.

Booking: Essential

→ BIBO, Apáczai Csere János u. 11, 1051

TATI

Contemporary, seasonal, farm-to-table (they have their own farm in Biatorbágy) restaurant delivering modern Hungarian fare that attracts a younger, design-conscious crowd: locals who care about where their ingredients come from, and tourists who’ve done their research beyond the obvious choices. The vibe is relaxed but attentive, the kind of restaurant that takes itself seriously without being precious about it.

Must order: Nature’s Negroni (negroni cut with nettle and hay)—worth the trip alone. The bitterness of Campari softened by something earthy and vegetal. I made a mental note to come back just for this drink.

The food: Start with the sharing platter of meats and cheeses with fresh bread, including slivers of lard that were surprisingly excellent, rich and silky rather than heavy. This was genuinely good, showcasing quality Hungarian ingredients without fuss. I ordered chicken paprikash for my main and found it underwhelming, despite flawless technique. Others at the table declared theirs excellent, so your experience may differ.

Booking: Recommended, especially for weekend lunches

→ TATI, Dohány u. 58-62, 1076

Time Out Market Budapest

This opened less than a week before our visit inside the restored 1926 Corvin Palace on Blaha Lujza Square. I was a little sceptical, gievn its part of a global franchise, from Lisbon to Dubai to Chicago. But the food was genuinely excellent, including premium Hungarian cold cuts from Michelin-starred chef Jenő Rácz, goulash soup from Szaletly, and neopolitan pizza from Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded Anyukám Mondta.

Atmosphere: Shiny, new and beautiful, with high ceilings, mood lighting and carefully calibrated design. The crowd surprised me: not gaggles of young tourists but multi-generational post-work groups, locals who’d come to see what this new thing was, whether it belonged here, whether it was for them. It buzzes with energy without feeling chaotic; the acoustics are good enough that you can actually have a conversation.

Highlights: Cocktails named after Danube bridges. Try Margaret Bridge: Lillet, elderflower, herbal soda, which was floral, refreshing and dangerously easy to drink. The Hungarian desserts were also a treat: Madártej (floating islands) and almond cake with gorgonzola ice cream from LIRA by Essência Restaurant. The cake was lovely, but the gorgonzola ice cream was an acquired taste — I don’t like blue cheese, and no amount of Michelin stars was going to change that!

Honest assessment: This is globalisation’s glorious trap. The food is excellent, but you could likely have a similar experience in any Time Out Market worldwide. The bridge-named cocktails and goulash soup are your reminders you’re in Budapest.

→ Time Out Market Budapest, Corvin Palace Blaha Lujza Square 1, 1085

Coffee culture

We arrived in Budapest at the tail end of Budapest Coffee Week — the first annual citywide coffee festival happening across dozens of cafés, roasteries, and event spaces. This is something I would have delved much deeper into had I been there on my own instead of following a press trip itinerary. From browsing their website afterwards, there were several places I wish I’d had time to visit properly. One to keep an eye on for next year if you’re a coffee devotee…

Cafés worth noting:

Kontakt

On the Pest side, Kontakt is good for an afternoon caffeine fix when you’ve been walking all day and need to sit somewhere that isn’t trying to be an Experience. The coffee is solid; the kind that hits the spot without requiring analysis, and I applaude their insistance of “no sugar, no Americano, no milk in filter.” They also do a good lemon and honey iced tea if you’re not in the mood for caffeine.

Nearby: Directly across from Kontakt is Rododendron art & design shop, where you’ll find beautiful artwork postcards of Budapest by local artists. If you love postcards (I do), or want souvenirs that aren’t mass-produced tourist tat, this is where to go. I came out with plenty of postcards and stickers, the kind of small beautiful things that make good memories tangible.

→ Kontakt, Károly krt. 22, 1052

SALT Bakery

The downtown pop-up on Zrínyi Street—sister to the Michelin-starred restaurant SALT—does the best flaky pastries and cookies. It’s the kind of place where you intend to buy one pastry and leave with four because everything in the case looks impossibly good and you lack the willpower to choose.

Worth knowing: It’s a pop-up, which means it likely won’t be permanent, but if it’s still there when you visit, go. The pastries are technically excellent without being fussy.

Pair it with: CAUSE café & roastery sits opposite, on the street leadin up to St. Stephen’s Basilica. Proper coffee to accompany your pastry haul.

→ SALT Bakery, Zrínyi u. 9, 1051

On my list for next time...

Madal café
We passed by this café en route to the Hungarian Parliament Building on Sunday morning, and I stopped to photograph it. A specialty coffee roastery and café with an apparent focus on quality beans and thoughtful preparation, the interior looked inviting through the windows: warm, minimalist, the kind of space designed for lingering over a good cup.

→ Madal, Alkotmány u. 4, 1054

Massolit
Sister to the Massolit I visited and loved in Kraków. Books and coffee, that perfect combination. The kind of place where you intend to stop for twenty minutes and end up staying two hours.

→ Massolit, Nagy Diófa u. 30, 1072

Espresso Embassy
Specialty coffee roastery and café. The kind of place where baristas can tell you about the origin, processing method, and tasting notes of every bean they serve. If you care deeply about coffee, this is apparently where you should go.

→ Espresso Embassy, Arany János u. 15, 1051

New York Café
Perhaps the most famous café in Budapest. We passed by in the car and there was a long queue out the door! It’s ornate, gilded, and the kind of place that appears in every Budapest guide under “most beautiful cafés in the world.” If you go, go for the architecture and the spectacle, not for a quiet coffee and pastry; I’d think of it as visiting a museum that happens to serve caffeine.

→ New York Café, Erzsébet krt. 9-11, 1073

This is the trade-off with press trips: you see what you’re meant to see, efficiently, hitting the highlights someone else has curated. But you miss the accidental discoveries, the neighbourhoods you’d have wandered into because you were following a coffee map, the conversations you’d have had with baristas about beans and brewing methods.

If I return to Budapest—and I’m sure I will—it’ll be during Coffee Week, with a list of cafés to work through systematically, with time to sit and read and let the city reveal itself at coffee-sipping pace rather than itinerary pace.

Cocktails and nightlife

Budapest’s drinking scene spans a remarkable spectrum, from polished rooftop bars where every surface has been considered, to ruin bars where decay becomes atmosphere. You can have both experiences in the same evening, or choose the one that suits your mood. The contrast tells you something about the city itself: capable of high polish and deliberate chaos, often simultaneously.

The Duchess at Matild Palace

Inspired by Archduchess Maria Klotild, who commissioned the Matild Palace to include a clandestine rooftop section as a rendezvous retreat for the Decadence Movement. The uber-chic bar continues that legacy of hidden luxury—accessed through a discreet entrance and private lifts that deliver you to what feels like another world entirely. It’s sophisticated without feeling stuffy; the kind of place where you feel you should be wearing something better than what you’re wearing, but no one actually checks. The crowd skews international and moneyed: hotel guests, well-dressed couples, people celebrating something.

Try: Tenshin (The Shift): San Cosme Mezcal, brown miso, wakame, cantaloupe melon, lime. It’s earthy and smoky, not for the faint-hearted, and arrived garnished with a tortilla chip topped with wakame, which was intriguing. The kind of garnish that existed to be photographed but added nothing to the actual drinking experience. The cocktail itself was what I wanted: challenging, distinctive. The person next to me made a face after one sip, and I loved it more because of that.

The view: Elisabeth Bridge glowing in the dark, the city arranged like a promise. The Danube below. This is the view you came to Budapest to see, delivered in a setting designed to make you feel sophisticated for seeing it. You’re paying for this view, and it’s worth it.

Worth knowing: This is expensive even by London standards. Come for one very good cocktail and the view rather than settling in for the evening, unless budget isn’t a concern.

→ The Duchess, Matild Palace, Váci u 36, 1056

Szimpla Kert

The original ruin bar in the Jewish Quarter, that pioneered the aesthetic of making beauty from neglect: mismatched furniture, plants growing through broken walls, art installations in unexpected corners, and rooms that sprawl through what was once a residential building.

Atmosphere: Chaotic, layered, and deliberately anti-design. Every room feels different: one has a Trabant car converted into seating, another has fairy lights strung through exposed beams, another is basically someone’s living room with peeling wallpaper and vintage armchairs. It’s crowded, loud, young, international. Everyone’s here—backpackers, locals, stag parties, solo travellers, people on dates. The courtyard fills with cigarette smoke and conversation in a dozen languages.

Worth knowing: It’s very touristy now, and appears in every Budapest guide (including this one!) But it’s touristy because it genuinely created something new: a whole aesthetic that’s been copied across the city and beyond. On Sunday mornings it transforms into a farmers’ market, which offers a completely different energy.

→ Szimpla Kert, Kazinczy u. 14, 1075

What to see

Buda side: the Castle District

We were driven up to Castle Hill, but the walk is apparently steep but manageable if you’re fairly fit and wearing sensible shoes; about 15 minutes of uphill cobblestones. If you’d rather save your energy, you can take the Funicular, a 19th-century cable car that runs from the end of Chain Bridge up to Buda Castle. It’s something I wish I’d experienced, being hauled up a hill in a tiny Victorian contraption, watching the city reveal itself gradually, the Danube widening below. According to the website, the Funicular runs every 10 minutes from early morning until late at night.

Book a walking tour

This matters more than you might think. Yes, you can wander Castle Hill independently with a guidebook or Google Maps, absorbing the architecture and views at your own pace. But having a knowledgeable local guide transforms the experience from sightseeing into understanding.

Our guide was Andrea, an interpreter and philologist, who was one of those rare people who could make you fall in love not just with a place, but with the act of paying attention itself. She spoke four languages and worked as a guide when she wasn’t translating. Over our three days together in Budapest, she returned again and again to Empress Elisabeth (Sissi), explaining how the Bavarian princess thrust into the rigid Habsburg court at sixteen found Budapest to be the place where she could breathe. How she learned Hungarian and developed a deep kinship with the country, helping bring about the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. The Hungarians loved her for it, and still do. These weren’t facts you could easily glean from a plaque or a Wikipedia page. This was context, connection and the human story underneath the monuments, which only a passionate guide can impart.

Worth knowing: Don’t be afraid to ask questions or dig deeper. When Andrea mentioned something in passing — a detail about the ghetto border, the symbolism of the 96-metre heights of Parliament and St. Stephen’s Basilica — we asked her to expand. She always did, generously, drawing connections between history and architecture and the way the city lives now.

How to book: Look for small group walking tours (6-12 people maximum) rather than massive tour groups. Private tours cost more but tend to offer flexibility. Budget £20-40 per person for a 2-3 hour Castle District tour.

Timing: Book for your first morning in Budapest if possible. Starting with a guide gives you the framework to understand everything else you’ll see over the next few days.

Fisherman's Bastion

This is where you get those iconic shots of Budapest, the ones that look almost too perfect to be real, through Neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque terraces built in the late 19th century, the white stone turrets and arches framing views of the Parliament building across the Danube. The whole structure was designed as a viewing platform, built between 1895 and 1902 to commemorate Hungary’s millennium. It was never a defensive fortification despite its name: it’s named after the fishermen who defended this stretch of wall in the Middle Ages.

Worth knowing: If you’re a morning person, sunrise here is supposed to be spectacular. I wasn’t up early enough to confirm this, but the light even at mid-morning was lovely; softer than harsh afternoon sun, the city still waking up. It is however incredibly popular with tourists, so expect to queue if you’re looking to get the picture-perfect shot.

Matthias Church

Unmistakable with its patterned Zsolnay-tiled roof; those distinctive diamond patterns in gold, green, and red. Despite being over 700 years old, what you see now is largely 19th-century restoration and expansion.

Worth knowing: The church sits right next to Fisherman’s Bastion, so you can see both in the same visit. The interior is ornate, with frescoes covering every surface in geometric patterns and gilding. If you’ve reached your capacity for ornate interiors after St. Stephen’s Hall (see below), the exterior alone is worth seeing for those tiles.

The Buda Castle Gardens

Whichever way you look at Castle Hill, there’s something worth seeing: the bridges crossing the Danube, ornate fountains and statues, the beautiful symmetry of formal gardens. The gardens are free to wander, and I’d recommed giving yourself time here, not just to see the individual elements, but to understand how they work together. How the whole complex was designed to be viewed from multiple angles, with every sightline was considered. It’s also just a lovely place to pause with a book in hand, watching the world go by and listening to the splish-splash-splatter of the fountains.

St. Stephen's Hall

Part of Buda Castle, St. Stephen’s Hall is one of the most awe-inspiring rooms you’ll ever encounter. During World War Two, the building was completely destroyed along with much of the city. In 2021 it reopened after careful restoration to its former glory: walnut panelling, majolica tiles, gilding, meticulous 19th-century excess.

What surprised me most though was the contemporary art in the Cercle Room before you enter the ornate hall. Sámuel Havadtoy’s meditation on doors and gates: doorways that lead nowhere, gates that frame emptiness, thresholds you can stand in but not cross. I didn’t expect to be moved by the space between things, but these spare installations spoke to fragility in a way the jewel box of St. Stephen’s Hall refused to.

Timing: Allow 3-4 hours for the entire Castle District: Fisherman’s Bastion, Matthias Church, the gardens, St. Stephen’s Hall, and time to just absorb the views from multiple vantage points.

Danube river cruise

The guidebooks are right about this one. Book a cruise that departs about an hour and a half before sunset — that in-between hour when the sky softens and the city starts to glow from within.

Why it works: The Parliament building in golden hour light, viewed from the water, is genuinely spectacular. The sun drops low behind Buda Castle, backlighting the hill, and the effect is almost embarrassingly perfect. The Parliament catches the golden light and holds it, the stone warming to amber, the spires and turrets suddenly making sense in a way they don’t from the ground. When viewed from the water, it’s easy to see why comparisons are made to Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel; that same neo-Gothic wedding cake quality, ornate excess rising against the sky.

The Danube is Europe’s second-longest river, carving through ten countries. It has seen empires rise and fall, been a border, a trade route, a strategic asset. The river literally divides this city into Buda and Pest, hill and flat, old and new. It’s the reason Budapest exists as Budapest and not as two separate cities. The city was designed to be viewed from here, architecture arranged for maximum effect, skyline as silhouette, every angle considered.

What you’ll see: Parliament on the Pest side, Buda Castle on the hill, the Chain Bridge, Elisabeth Bridge, the bridges illuminated as dusk deepens. As the boat turns to loop back, you’ll face away from Parliament toward Fisherman’s Bastion, toward the hill that holds so much of the city’s history. By then the light is almost gone, the sky deepening to navy, the first stars attempting to assert themselves against the city’s glow.

Honest assessment: It’s touristy, yes, but it’s also essential. The effect is undeniable. Some experiences become clichés because they genuinely deliver.

Booking: City Highlights Sightseeing cruises depart from Dock 42 port next to Budapest’s Szent István Park, and include a complimentary welcome drink on arrival
Worth knowing: Evening cruises can be chilly even in summer, so bring an extra layer

Pest Side: Parliament and Basilica

Hungarian Parliament

Designed by Imre Steindl and opened in 1902, the Hungarian Parliament has been the largest building in Budapest since completion; a massive neo-Gothic structure with 691 rooms, nearly 20km of staircases and that distinctive dome rising 96 metres (exactly the same height as St. Stephen’s Basilica, symbolising the equal importance of worldly and spiritual power). I recommend starting here early in the morning and taking a leisurely walk between Parliament and St. Stephen’s Basilica. The streets gradually shift character, revealing how the city negotiates between monument and everyday life.

St. Stephen's Basilica

The largest church in Budapest, St. Stephen’s Basilica sits within the city’s UNESCO World Heritage Site Buffer Zone. József Hild designed it originally, but in 1858 the dome collapsed, requiring complete demolition of everything that had been built and starting again from the ground up. Upon Hild’s death in 1867, the project passed to Miklós Ybl—the architect whose work appears everywhere in this city—who modified the plan toward a more neo-Renaissance style. Construction finally finished in 1905, fifty-four years after it began. The dome rises 96 metres, exactly the same height as the Parliament building. “This equation symbolises that worldly and spiritual thinking have the same importance,” our guide Andrea told us. From up here—accessible by lift or 364 steps if you’re feeling virtuous—you can see how the two buildings anchor the skyline, creating visual balance across the city.

Worth knowing: If you visit on Sunday, the main church area is closed for services. The lift to the viewing platform still operates. Sunday morning Pest spreads out below, church bells echoing from multiple directions, the Danube cutting its ancient path between Buda and Pest. During Advent, a Christmas fair fills the square in front of the basilica, and the façade is decorated with light projections in the evenings—the kind of seasonal transformation that turns a monument into something else entirely, at least temporarily.

Timing: Allow 2-3 hours for both Parliament and the Basilica, plus the walk between them

The Jewish Quarter: history you can't look away from

This is essential, not optional. The 7th district is where Budapest’s Jewish community established itself in the 19th century and where, in 1944, the Nazis established the Budapest Ghetto.

Dohány Street Synagogue

Europe’s largest synagogue, seating 3,000. Built between 1854 and 1859, the Moorish Revival architecture with distinctive onion domes makes it look like it belongs in Andalusia rather than Central Europe. Viennese architect Ludwig Förster believed ‘no distinctively Jewish architecture could be identified’ and thus chose Islamic models from North Africa and medieval Spain; a fascinating decision about identity, style, and how communities represent themselves in stone. The complex includes the Great Synagogue, Heroes’ Temple, graveyard, memorial and Jewish Museum, built on the site where Theodor Herzl was born in 1860. The founder of modern political Zionism was born here, on this street, in a house that no longer exists but whose location is marked.

The Border

Our guide stopped us on Dohány Street. “Here,” she said, gesturing to the pavement beneath our feet. “This was the border.” A leafy, pleasant street in the city centre now. In 1944, this was the western boundary of the Budapest Ghetto, where 70,000 Jews were sealed into less than 0.1 square miles. Cut off from food, medicine and heat during one of the coldest winters on record. By liberation in January 1945, thousands had died. Thousands survived, which was its own kind of miracle.

The neighbourhood now

Now you’ll find the neighbourhood full of ruin bars, vintage shops, street art and bustling cafés. The Jewish Quarter has become hip and desirable, the kind of neighbourhood that appears in travel guides under “The City’s Coolest District.” Understanding this district requires holding two truths simultaneously: it’s a memorial site and a nightlife destination. The tension isn’t resolved, it’s just lived with. It’s worth scheduling a few hours here to explore if possible, and don’t skip Szimpla Kert, even if it’s just to visit the Sunday morning farmer’s market.

Hungarian State Opera House

Built between 1875 and 1884, designed by Miklós Ybl—whose work is everywhere in this city—the Hungarian State Opera House is neo-Renaissance with Baroque elements, which means every surface is decorated. Marble staircases. Gilded railings. Frescoes on the ceiling. Chandeliers. Everything is red velvet and gold leaf and the particular kind of opulence that announces: art happens here, and art requires beauty.

What to do: Book a tour that includes a short performance. Even if you’ve never been to opera before (I hadn’t), hearing a trained soprano in this space makes you understand why buildings like this exist. A human voice, trained to do what these voices do, needs architecture that can hold it, amplify it, let it breathe and resonate and fill every corner with sound you don’t just hear but feel in your chest.

→ Hungarian State Opera House, Andrássy út 22, 1061

City Park (Liget)

Europe’s largest-scale cultural urban development project. The main entrance is at Heroes’ Square (World Heritage site).

Museum of Ethnography

Currently the world’s most modern institution of ethnography, designed by Hungarian architect Marcel Ferencz. The building is spectacular, shaped like two intertwined hillsides, covered by a roof garden spanning over 7,000m². Contemporary architecture that sits in the park like it grew there rather than was built.

The collections: Inside, the museum houses extensive collections documenting Hungarian folk culture, traditional crafts and ethnographic materials from around the world, connecting how people lived in rural Hungary centuries ago with global patterns of material culture.

Worth knowing: When we visited on a Monday morning, it was closed to the public for a film shoot—Netflix’s 3 Body Problem or possibly Dune: Messiah. Budapest has become a hotbed for Hollywood productions, and sometimes the present reality of the city’s role in global entertainment blocks access to its cultural institutions. Check opening hours and any temporary closures before you go.

If it’s closed: The exterior alone is worth seeing. That undulating roofline and the way it integrates with the landscape makes an architectural statement about what a 21st-century museum can look like.

Timing: Allow 2-3 hours if you’re actually going inside; 20 minutes if you’re just exploring the rooftop gardens. Or, bring a book and settle down in the gardens for longer.

→ Museum of Ethnography, Dózsa György út 35, 1146

House of Music Hungary

Designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, the House of Music sits in the park like something that landed there rather than being built, with a playfully undulating roof floating among the canopy of trees. The building is immediately recognisable from every angle. The roof was inspired by the vibration of sound, its surface pierced by exactly 100 uniquely shaped light wells, allowing natural light to flow into the building while creating different patterns depending on where you stand and how the light filters through.

The collections: Inside, the museum explores the history of music through interactive exhibitions, sound installations and a collection spanning classical Hungarian composers to contemporary music technology. The building itself is designed as an instrument; the architecture working with acoustics to create spaces where you experience sound differently in each room.

Worth knowing: It’s closed on Mondays, which is when we visited, but honestly just seeing the exterior was enough. We circled the building slowly, seeing how it changed from each direction, how the grey morning light filtered through those uniquely shaped openings, and how it managed to be both sculptural and functional.

Timing: 20 minutes for exploring the exterior; 2-3 hours if you’re visiting the exhibitions.

→ House of Music Hungary, Olof Palme stny. 3, 1146

Vajdahunyad Castle

We passed through briefly, this fantastical structure built in 1896 for the Millennial Exhibition, designed to showcase architectural styles from different periods and regions of Hungarian history. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque elements all coexisting, a deliberate construction of heritage that’s somehow deliveres.

Worth seeing: The Béla Lugosi bust, tucked into the castle grounds. A tribute to the Hungarian actor born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in 1882, who fled Hungary after the failed communist revolution in 1919 and eventually became synonymous with Dracula in the 1931 film. The role both made and trapped him; he became so associated with the character that he struggled to find other work, and by the time he died in 1956, he was buried in his Dracula cape.

→ Vajdahunyad Castle, Vajdahunyad stny., 1146

Museums I didn't visit (but would next time)

The press trip itinerary was thoughtfully curated—Buda Castle, St. Stephen’s Hall, the Opera House, the Jewish Quarter. It gave me a strong foundation in understanding Budapest’s history, architecture and how the city carries its complicated past. But three days isn’t enough to see everything, and these are the museums I’d prioritise on a return visit:

Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art
Central and Eastern European contemporary art, with rich collections of work by Hungarian artists including Lakner, Keserü, and Konkoly. The museum also houses important works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg, representing the more avant-garde and American Pop-Art forms alongside the Hungarian contemporary pieces.

→Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Komor Marcell u. 1, 1095

Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center
Named after the Hungarian-born war photographer Robert Capa (born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, 1913), the centre focuses on contemporary photography exhibitions that change regularly. Capa co-founded Magnum Photos and covered five wars before his death in 1954, making him one of the most influential photojournalists of the 20th century. The centre continues his legacy by showcasing both Hungarian and international contemporary photography.

→ Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Nagymező u. 8, 1065

Hungarian House of Photography (Mai Manó House)
Housed in the former studio and residence of court photographer Mai Manó (1855-1917), this is Hungary’s premier photography institution. Exhibitions span historical archives to contemporary Hungarian photographers, documenting how photography developed as an art form in Hungary from the 19th century through to present day. The building itself—a purpose-built photography studio from 1894—adds another layer, showing how photographers worked during the medium’s early decades.

→ Hungarian House of Photography, Nagymező u. 20, 1065

Walter Rózsi Villa
A 1930s modernist villa in the Buda hills designed by József Fischer and Eszter Pécsi, now serving as a museum dedicated to Hungarian architecture and design from the 20th and 21st centuries. The villa itself exemplifies interwar modernist architecture: clean lines, geometric forms, integration with the surrounding landscape. The museum’s exhibitions explore the evolution of Hungarian architecture beyond the grand 19th-century monuments, examining how architects responded to modernism, communism and contemporary challenges.

→ Walter Rózsi Villa, Bajza u. 10, 1071

Róth Museum
The home and studio of Miksa Róth (1865-1944), who created stained glass and mosaics for buildings across Budapest, including the Parliament. The museum preserves his workshop, showing where the craft happened and how those beautiful windows you’ve been photographing all weekend were actually made. Collections include his original designs, tools, and examples of his stained glass work, offering insight into the technical and artistic process behind some of Budapest’s most stunning decorative elements.

→ Róth Museum, Nefelejcs u. 26, 1078

Worth knowing: These are all contemporary or 20th-century focused museums, offering insight into how artists were thinking, making and responding to their moment. Most of these are smaller, less tourist-heavy than the big institutional museums. You won’t find them on every Budapest itinerary, but if your interest in cities extends beyond landmarks to understanding how people are making culture now, these matter.

Time required: You’d need at least two full days to see all of these properly. Maybe three if you want to absorb them at the pace they deserve rather than ticking them off a list.

Thermal baths: choose wisely

The authentic choice: Széchenyi or Gellért

These are the grand historic bath complexes with Neo-Baroque architecture and outdoor pools steaming in cold air, with water that’s been flowing from natural hot springs for centuries. This is the essential Budapest thermal bath experience, the one that connects you to a tradition stretching back to Roman times. The architecture matters. The history matters. The water actually coming from the earth matters.

→ Széchenyi thermal bath, Állatkerti krt. 9-11, 1146

→ Gellért, Kelenhegyi út 4, 1118 [n.b. currently closed for refurbishment]

What we did instead: Mandala Day Spa

A luxurious Oriental-themed retreat with four pools, Jacuzzi, steam room, sauna and zero gravity swings. Beautiful, modern and meticulously designed; the kind of polished wellness experience that could be in London, New York or Dubai. The water was heated spa water rather than thermal water from natural springs. I booked a twenty-minute foot massage after three days of walking cobblestones, and it was excellent; skilled, professional, exactly what my feet needed. The space was calm and relaxing. But it wasn’t the distinctively Budapest experience. It was the globalised wellness industry doing what it does well: offering relaxation as a refined, standardised product.

→ Mandala Day Spa, Ipoly u. 8, 1133

What to read: the perfect coffee stop companion

The Door by Magda Szabó

If you’re going to sit in Gerbeaud or Massolit or any of Budapest’s cafés with a book, make it this one. Magda Szabó is one of Hungary’s most celebrated writers, and The Door is her masterpiece; a complex, unsettling exploration of the relationship between a writer and her housekeeper, set against the backdrop of post-war Hungary. It’s not a light read; it’s psychologically complex and occasionally uncomfortable. The perfect accompaniment to strong coffee and something sweet to balance the bitterness.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

If you want something more propulsive and atmospheric, The Historian is your book. It’s a gothic novel about searching for Dracula through archives and libraries across Eastern Europe, with significant portions take place in Budapest. Part historical thriller, part meditation on how stories and legends shape places. It’s a much easier read than The Door; genuinely gripping, atmospheric, the kind of book you accidentally stay up too late reading. Perfect for a long flight or for reading in your hotel room before heading out to explore the city’s gothic architecture.

Practical information

Cobblestones: Everywhere. Bring proper walking shoes. Your feet will hate you otherwise.

Sunday closures: Real and inconvenient. Churches close for services. Some museums have limited hours. Plan accordingly.

Monday closures: Also real. Many museums close Mondays. We couldn’t access the House of Music or Museum of Ethnography interiors.

Tourist sites and film shoots: Budapest has become a Hollywood production hotbed in recent years. When we visited City Park, the Museum of Ethnography was closed for a film shoot (Netflix’s 3 Body Problem we think, or possibly Dune: Messiah).

Getting around

I didn’t actually take the tram during my trip. Being on a press trip meant being ferried about town in a minibus, which was comfortable but insulating. We stopped to photograph the trams as they passed, those iconic yellow vehicles that are so distinctly Budapest, but I never boarded one.

Ordinarily I would have jumped on the tram straight away. I think you get a great feel for a city both on foot and using the locals’ mode of transport; the rhythms of how people actually move through their days, the stops where everyone gets off, the way the vehicle fills and empties at different times.

What I can tell you from research:

Budapest’s tram network is extensive and efficient, rivaling the metro system in passenger numbers. For visitors, it’s also one of the most pleasant ways to see the city, particularly tram line 2, which runs along the Danube River.

The M1 Metro Line The oldest subway on mainland Europe. Walking down to the tiled stations feels like stepping back in time, with original 19th-century design, beautifully preserved. It’s functional heritage, still doing the work it was built to do over a century ago.

Tram Line 2: The Scenic Route This runs along the Danube embankment on the Pest side, offering views of Buda Castle, the Parliament building, the bridges. It’s essentially a moving viewing platform, but one that costs the price of a tram ticket rather than a river cruise.

Worth knowing: The city uses both modern trams (including the long CAF Orbus) and older “nostalgic” trams on special routes. The nostalgic trams require different tickets.

Tickets and Payment Purchase tickets at stops via machines or through the BKK app, which also provides real-time schedule updates.

Taxis and Ride-Hailing

Bolt is the most popular ride-hailing app in Budapest and typically offers good rates. Uber also operates reliably in the city. If using traditional taxis, book through official companies (Főtaxi, City Taxi, Taxi4) via their apps rather than hailing on the street to avoid overcharging. As with most places, unlicensed drivers and tourist-area scams can be an issue.

How long do you need in Budapest?

Three days is enough to fall for Budapest, not enough to see everything. The city rewards surrender; letting go of the exhausting work of finding the “authentic” experience and just experiencing what’s in front of you.

If you have less time, I’d prioritise:

The Danube cruise at sunset
Buda Castle Hill walking tour
The view from St. Stephen’s Basilica
Coffee and cake at Gerbeaud
An authentic Hungarian meal at Gundel or IDA

If you have more time, add:

Exploring the Jewish Quarter, especially Szimpla Kert
More contemporary art spaces
A thermal bath experience

Final verdict

If you’re looking for budget friendly city breaks with Jet2holidays, Budapest delivers on every front; affordability, beauty, and substance without exhaustion. The flights from Manchester Airport are smooth and well-timed, making it an easy weekend escape or longer city break.

Want the full story behind these recommendations: the weight of history, the tension between authenticity and performance, the moments that surprised me? Read my complete Budapest travel essay: A city that hums in two keys.

I was hosted on a press trip in Budapest by Jet2 and VisitBudapest but, as always, all thoughts and opinions are my own. All photography © Kate Baxter. Portraits of me by JamieChanceTravels.

The post Budapest in 3 days: an honest first-timer’s guide. appeared first on Fabric of my Life..

A city that hums in two keys.

kate — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 07:00:00 +0000

We arrived in Budapest at night, which meant the city withheld itself. Just streetlights, the occasional lit window, the Danube reduced to a dark ribbon we crossed without ceremony.

It was Friday, nearly eleven, and the hunger was the kind that made you stupid. Too tired to be discerning, too late to find anywhere good still open.

We ended up at McDonald’s.

The self-service terminal greeted us in Hungarian, but with one tap of the screen—mercifully, depressingly—we could switch it to English. The menu revealed itself to be exactly the same as everywhere else, bar the pepper and onion potato strips I only noticed after ordering.

It was only later that I learnt this particular McDonald’s opened in 1988 on Régi Posta Street in the 5th district. The first in Budapest. The first glimpse, for teenagers living under communism, that the West—that gleaming, impossible idea—was one step closer. That you could taste it, literally, in the form of a Big Mac. Teenagers lined up here in 1988 for something I now ate sheepishly, apologetically, because I was too tired to find “authentic” Hungarian food on my first night in Budapest.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Nothing about this trip was authentic in the way I usually try to engineer authenticity. This was a press trip with Jet2 and VisitBudapest, who chose the hotel, the restaurants, the itinerary. I was here to follow someone else’s vision of what Budapest should be, which meant I was absolved of the exhausting work of curation. Sometimes though, this is the best way to encounter a city: surrendered, surprised, letting someone else decide where you should look.

→Planning your own trip to Hungary? Based on this travelogue, I’ve written a complete Budapest travel guide where I break down where to eat, what to see, which thermal baths to choose, and what’s actually worth your time and money.

The gates that lead nowhere

The next morning our small group gathered outside the Hilton Budapest on Castle Hill. A hotel that had done something strange and specific with history: it was built around the ruins of the Dominican Saint Nicholas Cloister, which dated from the mid-13th century. The remains didn’t sit politely to one side as decoration, they cut straight through the building, separating it into northern and southern wings. Medieval stone and modern glass, coexisting.

Our guide was Andrea, and within the first ten minutes it became clear that she was one of those rare people who could make you fall in love not just with a place, but with the act of paying attention itself. She spoke four languages—Hungarian, English, German, Dutch—and worked as an interpreter and philologist when she wasn’t leading tourists up this hill. Over the next three days, she would beguile us with stories from her travels, each one offered not as credential but as gift.

She gestured toward the Danube below—”There, you see, the Chain Bridge, built in 1849“—and then paused. “But of course, none of this would have been possible without Empress Elisabeth’s influence on Franz Joseph.”

Sissi. She said the name with the kind of warmth you reserve for a friend you’ve known your whole life.

Andrea returned to Empress Elisabeth again and again over the next three days. “She was the Princess Diana of her time,” she told us. Beautiful, trapped, beloved, tragic. A woman who belonged to an empire but couldn’t belong to herself.

The details accumulated as we explored Castle Hill: Elisabeth was Bavarian, thrust into the rigid Habsburg court at sixteen. Four children, but her mother-in-law took them from her, raised them according to Habsburg protocol. Elisabeth found the court suffocating. She escaped to Hungary whenever she could, drawn to its relative freedom. She learnt Hungarian, developed a deep kinship with the country and its people, helped bring about the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. The Hungarians loved her for it. Still do.

“She comes here,” Andrea said, sweeping her hand to indicate not just the castle but the whole country, “and she can breathe.”

We were hurried away from the view—away from the sunshine, the river, the open air—and shepherded indoors to St. Stephen’s Hall. I’m not someone who naturally gravitates toward ornate architecture, but what surprised me wasn’t the hall itself—though we’d get there—but what came before it.

In the Cercle Room, I stopped completely. It was a contemporary art installation by Sámuel Havadtoy: a meditation on doors and gates as symbols of beginnings, endings, and the fragile founding of the Hungarian state. Doorways that led nowhere. Gates that framed emptiness. Thresholds you could stand in but not cross. The installation was spare, almost austere, which made it breathe in a way the ornate historical hall—waiting just beyond—could not.

I didn’t expect contemporary art in a reconstructed Baroque palace, and certainly didn’t expect to be moved by the space between things. Havadtoy’s doors and gates spoke to fragility in a way the jewel box of St Stephen’s Hall refused to. They said: nothing is certain. Every beginning contains its ending.

Eventually, I followed the group into St. Stephen’s Hall itself. A room that was destroyed in World War II and then rebuilt, piece by painstaking piece, based on archival photographs and collective memory. In 1897, architect Alajos Hauszmann proposed a “Hungarian-style hall” to Emperor Franz Joseph, designed as a jewel box where every surface could be ornate, precious and intricate. He hired the finest craftspeople: Endre Thék for the walnut panelling, Vilmos Zsolnay for the majolica tiles and imposing fireplace. The room won a grand prize at the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Then it was bombed. Then it was gone.

In 2021, 121 years after it won that prize in Paris, it reopened, rebuilt “in a manner entirely faithful to the original.” It was exactly what you’d imagine: overwhelming, meticulous, gilded, a testament to turn-of-the-century excess and skill.

But I kept thinking about the room before this one. The gates that led nowhere. The doors that framed emptiness.

The emperor's pancake

By the time we arrived at Ida, we were all starving. The restaurant announced itself immediately: grandiose interior, long bar, grand piano, mirrored back wall, towering ceiling with domed vault, white linen tablecloths. Elegant without being stiff.

The restaurant was named after Ida Lafite—Franciska “IDA” Lafite—a governess born in Graz who became the wife of Miklós Ybl, the architect whose work was everywhere in this city. The Várkert Bazaar, the Opera House, the dome of St. Stephen’s Basilica; all Ybl. And behind him, supposedly, was Ida. “Behind every successful man stands a strong woman,” the restaurant’s literature reminded us.

The menu was exactly what you’d expect from a restaurant billing itself as Austro-Hungarian: schnitzel, goulash, paprikash, dumplings, strudel. These were the dishes that survived the empire’s dissolution, foods that now belonged to multiple countries—Austria and Hungary, yes, but also Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, parts of Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Italy—each insisting on their own authentic version.

I ordered the Wiener Schnitzel with potato salad. It was enormous, a thin, breaded cutlet of veal that almost extended past the edges of the plate, golden and crisp. The potato salad was vinegary, simple. There was no surprise here, no twist, no chef’s “interpretation.” Just schnitzel, made correctly, the way it had been made for over a century.

Dessert menus arrived, and I knew immediately I couldn’t manage it. But I watched with specific jealousy as several companions ordered the Kaiserschmarrn with apricot jam and apple purée, a lightly sweetened pancake, shredded and caramelised, that took its name from Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I.

Franz Joseph again. The emperor whose portrait hung in St. Stephen’s Hall, who ruled for 68 years over an empire that would dissolve shortly after his death. The man Sissi married at sixteen, the man she fled from repeatedly.

And here was his pancake, still being served in restaurants across Vienna and Budapest, outlasting the empire, outlasting the emperor himself. Food as monument. Food as memory.

When it was offered, I stole a small forkful. It tasted like something an emperor might eat in private, away from state dinners, when he just wanted something comforting and simple and good. It tasted, honestly, like the best thing I’d eaten all day. I immediately regretted not ordering my own.

The river that divides and connects

The cruise left at precisely the moment when the light began its shift from afternoon to something else. Not quite evening yet, but no longer day, that in-between hour when the sky softened and the city started to glow from within.

The boat was modest and functional, the kind of tourist vessel that ran this route multiple times daily. We pulled away from the dock and the city began to reveal itself as skyline, as silhouette, as architecture arranged for maximum effect. The sun was dropping low behind Buda Castle, backlighting the hill we’d climbed that morning, and the effect was almost embarrassingly perfect. The Parliament caught the golden light and held it, the stone warming to amber, the spires and turrets suddenly making sense in a way they hadn’t from the ground.

Someone behind me said something about The Grand Budapest Hotel. About how the Parliament building looked just like Wes Anderson’s fictional hotel, that same ornate excess, those impossible spires and turrets rising against the sky.

They were right, in a way. Though I knew Anderson never filmed here. It was Görlitz, Germany, mostly, with the hotel itself a construction of production design and imagination. But the hotel itself was inspired by another Budapest landmark—the Gellért Hotel—designed by Hungarian architects Ármin Hegedűs, Artúr Sebestyén and Izidor Sterk, whose pre-war glamour faded under decades of communism into grim Soviet-style functionality—exactly like Anderson’s fictional Grand Budapest.

The world Anderson created, drawn from Stefan Zweig’s writings about Central European café society and the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was drawn from places exactly like this. From cities that built monuments to imperial power, and then watched those empires dissolve, leaving behind the architecture as evidence, as ghost, as tourist attraction.

The Parliament building was completed in 1902, when Budapest was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still one of Europe’s great capitals, still flush with the confidence that comes from believing your world will last forever. By 1918, the empire was gone. By 1945, much of the building around it was destroyed. By 1989, communism ended. And through it all, the Parliament sat on the Danube, that neo-Gothic confection, being photographed in golden light by tourists on river cruises who may or may not have been thinking about Wes Anderson.

Anderson’s film understands something true about this part of Europe. How beauty persists despite destruction, how elegance and tragedy coexist, how places can be simultaneously magnificent and melancholy. Standing on this boat, watching the Parliament glow in the dying light, I understood why people made the connection even if it wasn’t literally accurate. The aesthetic was right. That sense of faded grandeur, of something magnificent that survived precisely because it was too beautiful to completely destroy.

The Danube literally divides this city into two parts, Buda and Pest, hill and flat, old and new, residential and commercial. It’s the reason Budapest exists as Budapest and not as two separate cities. It connects and separates in the same gesture. It has been crossed and re-crossed for over a thousand years. Armies have fought for control of its bridges. Lovers have met on its banks. Bodies have been thrown into it during wartime and peacetime and the long, complicated stretches in between.

The boat turned, beginning the loop back toward the dock, and for a moment we were facing away from the Parliament, looking instead toward the castle, toward Fisherman’s Bastion, toward the hill that held so much of the city’s history. The light was almost gone now, the sky deepening to navy, the first stars attempting to assert themselves against the city’s glow.

Globalisation's glorious trap

I love a good food market, but I’m always skeptical of markets that arrive as part of a franchise, especially one as aggressively global as Time Out. Lisbon, New York, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Dubai, Cape Town, Porto, Barcelona, Bahrain, Osaka. And now Budapest.

Time Out Market Budapest had opened less than a week before our visit, which meant everything was shiny and new. It sat inside the restored Corvin Palace, a 1926 neoclassical department store on Blaha Lujza Square. The crowd surprised me: not gaggles of young tourists but multi-generational post-work groups, locals who’d come to see what this new thing was: whether it belonged here, whether it was for them.

We moved through the stalls, sampling. The food was excellent. This wasn’t mediocre tourist fare dressed up with mood lighting. Premium Hungarian cold cuts and cheeses from Michelin-starred chef Jenő Rácz. Layered potatoes and goulash soup from Szaletly. Chewy-crisp Margherita pizza from Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded Anyukám Mondta. Hungarian desserts: Madártej—floating islands—and Almond Cake with Gorgonzola Ice Cream from LIRA by Essência Restaurant.

The cake was lovely. The Gorgonzola ice cream was an acquired taste. I don’t like blue cheese, and no amount of Michelin stars was going to change that. It was still a no from me.

The cocktails were each named after a bridge that crossed the Danube; a nice touch. I ordered Margaret Bridge: Lillet, elderflower, herbal soda. Floral and refreshing and dangerously easy to drink.

The food was good. The space was beautiful. This was globalisation’s gorgeous trap. It’s not that the experience was bad, it’s that the experience was good, so good that you almost didn’t notice you were eating the same curated excellence you could eat in Lisbon or Dubai or Chicago, with only the bridge-named cocktails and the goulash soup to remind you you were in Budapest.

By the time we reached The Duchess, night had fully committed. The rooftop bar sat atop the Matild Palace, and the vibe was chill but exclusive in that specific way luxury spaces have perfected. The décor was all plush velvet, art deco touches and carefully calibrated mood lighting. Every surface had been considered. Every angle was Instagram-ready.

I ordered the Tenshin—The Shift: San Cosme Mezcal, brown miso, wakame, cantaloupe melon, lime. It arrived garnished with a tortilla chip topped with wakame, which was… intriguing. The kind of garnish that existed to be photographed but added nothing to the actual drinking experience.

The cocktail itself was earthy and smoky, not for the faint-hearted, which was exactly what I wanted. I loved it. The person next to me took a sip and made a face that suggested they did not love it, which somehow made me love it more.

Where worldly and spiritual meet

Every Budapest travel guide tells you to visit the Parliament building and St. Stephen’s Basilica, and they’re right, but the real revelation is the walk between them, through streets that gradually shift character, revealing how the city negotiates between monument and everyday life.

Sunday morning in Budapest arrived with a particular quality of mercy: the city had given itself permission to move slowly. We met Andrea in the lobby, ready for Pest, the flat side, the commercial side, where the city did its daily work of being a capital.

We started at the Parliament building, that massive neo-Gothic structure sitting on the Danube’s eastern bank. Designed by Imre Steindl and opened in 1902, it had been the largest building in Budapest since its completion. Andrea told us how it was designed to house the National Assembly after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 gave Hungary more autonomy within the empire, how it survived World War II relatively intact while so much of Budapest burnt, and how it now housed a democracy that was complicated, imperfect, contested.

We walked from the Parliament toward St. Stephen’s Basilica, the streets gradually shifting, becoming less monumental, more commercial. The basilica announced itself before you saw it, it’s massive neo-classical dome rising 96 metres, exactly the same height as the Parliament building. “This equation symbolises that worldly and spiritual thinking have the same importance,” Andrea reminded us.

It was Sunday, which meant the main part of the church was closed for services, mass in progress, the faithful inside, tourists politely redirected. This suited me fine. I’m agnostic, atheist, somewhere in that territory where other people’s faith is something I respect without sharing. Everyone has the right to their beliefs, to worship however they see fit, and I have no interest in intruding upon that. Better to stay outside, to witness the architecture, to let the building speak for itself.

Instead we took the elevator up to the viewing platform. Sunday morning Pest spread out below, waking slowly. Church bells rang from multiple directions. From up here, the 96-metre equation between worldly and spiritual power felt less like symbolism and more like city planning: two buildings of equal height creating visual balance, anchoring the skyline.

Andrea pointed out landmarks: Andrássy Avenue stretching toward Heroes’ Square, the Great Market Hall’s Zsolnay-tiled roof, the Jewish Quarter where we were headed next. “You see there,” she said, gesturing toward a specific neighbourhood, “that was the ghetto. The border ran along Dohány Street.”

From up here, there was no visible border. Just buildings, streets, the democratic sprawl of urban life. But borders don’t disappear just because you can’t see them from 96 metres up.

We descended the winding staircase from the basilica’s viewing platform and walked to Vörösmarty Square, where Gerbeaud Café sat like it had been there forever, which it more or less had, since 1858. The interior delivered exactly what it promised: high ceilings, chandeliers, marble tables, the particular elegance of early 20th-century café culture. The walls were cream and gold, the furniture dark wood and velvet the colour of wine.

The pastry case was obscene. Rows and rows of cakes, tortes, slices, each one more elaborate than the last.

Our tasting menu included three cakes. The Gerbeaud Slice was my immediate favourite. Layers of walnut and apricot jam sandwiched between thin pastry, topped with dark chocolate. Not too sweet, the walnuts providing texture and a slight bitterness that balanced the jam’s sweetness. The Royal Chocolate Cake was dense, rich, unapologetically chocolate. The Blackberry Yoghurt Cake was lighter, fresher.

Andrea told us about the café’s history and how it survived World War II, operated under communism, then reopened after 1989. “But the Gerbeaud Slice,” she said, “that hasn’t changed. Same recipe, same technique, same walnut-apricot-chocolate combination that Émile Gerbeaud created.

The border you can't see from 96 metres up

From Gerbeaud, the walk to the Jewish Quarter took us through streets that gradually shifted in character. Pest’s 7th district, where Budapest’s Jewish community established itself in the 19th century and where, in 1944, the Nazis established the Budapest Ghetto.

The Dohány Street Synagogue appeared suddenly, its distinctive onion domes and Moorish Revival architecture making it look like it belonged in Andalusia rather than Central Europe. Built between 1854 and 1859, it was designed by Viennese architect Ludwig Förster, who believed “no distinctively Jewish architecture could be identified” and thus chose Islamic models from North Africa and medieval Spain. The result was stunning. The largest synagogue in Europe, seating 3,000 people.

Andrea explained that the complex consisted of the Great Synagogue, the Heroes’ Temple, a graveyard, a memorial, and the Jewish Museum, built on the site where Theodor Herzl was born. He was born here. On this street. In a house that no longer existed but whose location was marked. Andrea stopped us on the street outside the synagogue. “Here,” she said, gesturing to the pavement beneath our feet. “This was the border.“

Dohány Street; a leafy, pleasant street in the city centre now. In 1944, this street was the western boundary of the Budapest Ghetto, where 70,000 Jews were forced into an area of less than 0.1 square miles. Sealed off by wooden fences and brick walls. Guarded. Cut off from food, medicine and heat during one of the coldest winters on record. Andrea then told us about the liberation in January 1945, when Soviet forces reached Budapest. By the time the Red Army liberated the ghetto, thousands had died from starvation, disease, cold, violence. But thousands survived. Which was its own kind of miracle.

We walked deeper into the 7th district, and the neighborhood shifted again: ruin bars, vintage shops, street art and bustling cafés. The Jewish Quarter has become hip and desirable, the kind of neighborhood that appears in travel guides under headings like “Where to Go Out in Budapest” and “The City’s Coolest District.“

This is where we’ll end up later tonight, at Szimpla Kert, the original ruin bar, the one that pioneered the aesthetic of drinking in crumbling buildings, of turning decay into atmosphere, of making beauty from neglect. But right now, in Sunday morning light, the district feels quieter, caught between its traumatic past and its gentrified present, trying to figure out what it means to be both a memorial site and a nightlife destination.

Lunch at TATI felt like a deliberate shift after the morning’s immersion in heritage and history. Where Gerbeaud traded on 140 years of unchanged recipes, TATI announced itself as something different: contemporary, seasonal, farm-to-table in the most literal sense (they had their own farm).

I ordered the chicken paprikash. It felt like the inevitable choice, I’d been circling this dish all weekend, hearing about it, seeing it on menus, understanding it as quintessentially Hungarian. If I was going to eat chicken paprikash, it should be here, at a restaurant staking its reputation on elevating traditional dishes while honouring their origins.

While we waited, I ordered a Nature’s Negroni; negroni cut with nettle and hay. When it arrived, it was perfect. The bitterness of the Campari was still there, but softened, rounded out by something earthy and vegetal. It was the kind of cocktail that made you understand why people care about craft bartending, why ingredients matter, and why taking something classic and adjusting it thoughtfully can result in something better than the original.

I made a mental note: come back to TATI just for this negroni.

The chicken paprikash arrived, beautiful and carefully plated. The waiter, delivering it with evident pride, told me it was “the best in the city.“

I took a bite.

It was… fine.

Good, even. The chicken was perfectly cooked, tender and moist. The sauce was clearly made with quality paprika, cream, probably stock that took hours to develop. The technique was flawless.

But I was underwhelmed.

Maybe it was that I hadn’t tasted the version at IDA to compare. Maybe chicken paprikash—for all its reputation as the quintessential Hungarian dish—just wasn’t speaking to me the way I’d hoped. Maybe I was expecting something transformative, some moment of culinary revelation, and instead I was just eating very good chicken in paprika sauce.

When craft becomes performance

The Hungarian State Opera House sat on Andrássy Avenue like a jewel in a velvet box; ornate and perfectly proportioned. Built between 1875 and 1884, and designed by the one and only Miklós Ybl, it was neo-Renaissance with Baroque elements, which meant every surface was decorated.

Andrea told us: “Although in size and capacity it is not among the greatest, in beauty and the quality of acoustics the Budapest Opera House is considered to be amongst the finest opera houses in the world.“

Not the biggest, but the best. It was a very Hungarian claim.

I’d never been to the opera before. Never really felt the urge, if I’m honest. Opera had always seemed like one of those things that existed in a separate cultural sphere, requiring knowledge I didn’t have. But a short performance in a building like this? That I could do.

We entered through heavy doors and immediately the interior delivered on every promise the exterior made. Marble staircases. Gilded railings. Frescoes on the ceiling. Chandeliers. Everything was red velvet and gold leaf and the particular kind of opulence that announced: art happens here, and art requires beauty.

The auditorium seated maybe 1,200 people—intimate by opera house standards—but the horseshoe shape, the multiple tiers of boxes rising toward the ceiling, the frescoes depicting the nine Muses delivered a sense of hushed awe.

Back out on the main staircase, we settled onto the cold marble steps for a short performance. I didn’t know what she was singing. I didn’t recognise the aria, didn’t understand the Italian. But I understood, immediately and completely, why people built buildings like this. Because a human voice, trained to do what this woman’s voice was doing, needed space to exist in. It needed architecture that could hold it, amplify it, let it breathe and resonate and fill every corner with sound that you didn’t just hear but felt in your chest, your throat, your bones.

The First Strudel House of Pest was a family-owned restaurant that opened in 2007 with the explicit mission of preserving “the true Hungarian tradition of strudel-making.” The restaurant has leaned into its mission, turned preservation into performance, made the act of watching someone stretch dough into entertainment.

A young man in traditional dress stood with a ball of dough, a floured table, and an audience of people with cameras at the ready. Stretching strudel dough, he told us through a translator, was “a true form of art that had been perfected for centuries.” The goal was to make the dough so thin you could read a newspaper through it.

He worked the dough with his hands, pulling gently from the centre, working his way around the edges, stretching incrementally, patiently. His hands moved with the kind of confidence that came from repetition, from doing the same thing hundreds of times until it became automatic, muscle memory.

It was mesmerising to watch, the transformation from small ball to large translucent sheet, the precarious thinness that suggested one careless movement would destroy the whole thing.

The now-baked strudel arrived at our table still warm: one classic túró (cottage cheese), one apple.

I was underwhelmed, if I’m honest.

The cottage cheese strudel was… fine. The pastry was thin and flaky, exactly as promised, but the filling retained that cottage cheese texture I really wasn’t a fan of. The apple strudel was better, but still disappointing. As a lover of British apple crumble, I found the strudel lacked the comforting spice I associated with cooked apples. No cinnamon to speak of, no warmth, just apples and sugar and pastry that was technically impressive but emotionally unsatisfying.

The restaurant buzzed with customers though, every table full, so I was clearly in the minority.

When playfulness wins

Between the strudel house and dinner, we were granted a brief reprieve: an hour back at the hotel to shower, change, shed the accumulated exhaustion of a day spent absorbing culture and craft and cake. By the time we reconvened in the lobby, the light had shifted to that blue-grey dusk that made cities look their most cinematic.

We were headed to BIBO, Dani García’s restaurant on the top floor of the Dorothea Hotel. If I were writing a traditional Budapest travel guide, I’d list this as “upscale fusion restaurant with Danube views.” But that misses what makes BIBO special: the willingness to be playful with tradition, to ask “what if goulash was a croquette?” and deliver an answer that makes you laugh with delight.

The street entrance to the rooftop restaurant immediately announced itself as Something, a play of metal spheres and reflective surfaces, a game of illusion that drew your eye. The lift took us up to the top floor. More spheres, more mirrors. The bar area glowed with warm light, the petrol blue and burnt orange and salmon of the seating creating a colour palette that shouldn’t work but did, jewel tones against dark surfaces, giant glass flowers floating overhead.

We were led to a private dining room at the back. The space was beautiful, intimate, dominated by a large moon painting that took up most of one wall. We settled around a long table, white linens, wine glasses already set. Six courses with wine pairings, showcasing Chef Dani García’s approach to fusion, taking Spanish techniques and sensibilities, pairing them with Hungarian ingredients and traditions, and creating something that belonged to both cultures and neither.

The first course arrived: guacamole, burrata, soya beans. Mexican, Italian, Asian. A statement of intent: we’re not bound by the two cuisines in the restaurant’s name. We’re pulling from everywhere.

The second course was the one that made me laugh. Goulash reimagined as a croquette, served atop a warm sculpture of a hand. The exterior golden and crispy, the interior revealing itself as concentrated goulash: rich, meaty, and intensely flavoured with paprika. It took a dish that was usually about abundance and made it elegant, portable, a single perfect bite. This was the moment where I understood what contemporary Hungarian cuisine could be when it wasn’t trying to preserve tradition but instead using tradition as a starting point for invention.

The third course was poetry. “The foie that wanted to be a cherry“—the phrasing alone was worth the price of admission. Foie gras presented as a cherry, served with sour cherry compote. Whimsy and technical showmanship.

The fourth course was the most overtly fusion: krumplis tészta reimagined with paccheri, roasted octopus, soy sabayon, kimchi paprika. Every element pulling from a different culinary tradition, but it worked. The octopus was tender, charred at the edges. The kimchi paprika added heat and funk. And underneath it all, the ghost of krumplis tészta—potatoes and pasta—humble Hungarian comfort food anchoring this complicated construction.

The fifth course was a palate reset: beef tenderloin, classic and simple. Perfect execution rather than innovation.

The final course brought us back to strudel, but not the strudel we’d had that afternoon. This was BIBO’s version: deconstructed, reimagined, incorporating yellow beetroot and orange alongside the traditional apple. After the afternoon’s traditional demonstration, this felt like a direct response. I respect the tradition, I understand the craft, but I’m not interested in replicating it.

And I preferred this. The beetroot added depth, the orange cut through the sweetness, the pastry provided texture without overwhelming. It was playful without being precious, contemporary without being alienating.

We finished, full and slightly drunk on wine and satisfaction. Through the windows, Budapest glowed in the dark. The Danube reflecting city lights, the bridges illuminated, the Parliament building doing its night-time work of being spectacularly beautiful.

When the city closes its doors

Monday morning arrived colder and gloomier than the previous days. The sky was low and grey, threatening rain but not quite committing, and we were bundled in jackets we hadn’t needed yesterday.

We started at the Great Market Hall, the practical beginning to our final day in Budapest. The market was already loud, crowded, alive with the particular energy of a place where locals and tourists negotiated the same space with different purposes. Locals needed vegetables for the week. Tourists needed paprika to bring home as proof they were here.

The building itself was impossible to miss with that distinctive Zsolnay-tiled roof in green and gold, catching the light. Built in 1897, it was designed by Samu Pecz, and is the largest and oldest indoor market in Budapest.

We entered through the main doors and the smell hit immediately: meat, cheese, bread, paprika, vegetables. The ground floor was produce, meats, pastries, candies, spices, spirits. Andrea navigated us through, pointing out the paprika stalls, rows and rows of red powder in varying shades and intensities. Tokaji wine in bottles that looked like they were designed in 1950 and never updated. Túró Rudi, a chocolate-covered cottage cheese bar, individually wrapped in red and white packaging. Kolbász sausage hanging in loops. Salami thick as your forearm. Pickled everything.

Afterwards, we headed to City Park (Liget in Hungarian), a massive public park that sits northeast of the city centre. The park’s main entrance was at Heroes’ Square, one of Hungary’s World Heritage sites, a vast plaza dominated by the Millennium Monument.

Except that morning, Heroes’ Square was cordoned off. Police barriers, security personnel, official cars with flags. After some digging, Andrea explained that Numan Kurtulmuş, Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye, was here to lay a wreath at the Monument of the Unknown Soldier. We caught a glimpse from a distance—dark suits, solemn faces, diplomatic choreography—and then were ushered along, past the barriers, into the park.

City Park spread out before us: 302 acres, Europe’s largest-scale cultural urban development project, winner of the FIABCI World Prix d’Excellence for best urban development. The Liget Budapest Project has transformed this park over the last decade, adding new cultural institutions while preserving its character as public recreational space.

We were headed first to the Museum of Ethnography, currently the world’s most modern institution of ethnography, designed by Hungarian architect Marcel Ferencz. The building was spectacular from the outside, shaped like two intertwined hillsides, covered by a roof garden with an area of over 7,000 square metres.

Except that morning, the Museum of Ethnography was closed to the public for a film shoot. Budapest had become something of a hotbed for Hollywood productions and Netflix series lately. Andrea thought it might be for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem or possibly Dune: Messiah, though she wasn’t certain. The building was cordoned off, production vehicles parked nearby, crew members moving with purposeful efficiency.

It was disappointing and also kind of funny. We’d come to see the future of Budapest’s cultural development and we were blocked by the present reality of Budapest’s role in the global entertainment industry.

Nearby, the House of Music Hungary sat in the park like something that had landed there rather than been built, with a playfully undulating roof floating among the canopy of trees. Designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, the roof was inspired by the vibration of sound, its surface pierced by exactly 100 uniquely shaped light wells, allowing natural light to flow into the building.

We walked around the perimeter slowly, seeing how the building changed from each direction, how those 100 holes created different patterns depending on where you stood, how the grey morning light filtered through them.

It was Monday, which meant the building was closed. No interior access. Just the exterior, which was what we’d come to see anyway, the architecture itself and the way it sat in the park, the relationship between building and landscape. We circled the building slowly, taking photos from different angles, and then Andrea led us toward Vajdahunyad Castle, tucked deeper into the park.

The castle was a strange thing. Built in 1896 for the Millennial Exhibition, it was designed to showcase architectural styles from different periods and regions of Hungarian history. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements all coexisting in one fantastical structure.

“There’s something I want to show you,” Andrea said, leading us around to a quieter section of the castle grounds. The Béla Lugosi bust sat there, bronze and solemn. A tribute to the Hungarian actor born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in 1882, who fled Hungary after the failed communist revolution in 1919 and eventually became synonymous with Dracula in the 1931 film.

Andrea told us how Lugosi became so associated with the character that he struggled to find other work, how by the time he died in 1956, he was buried in his Dracula cape. “The role made him famous,” she said, “but it also trapped him.”

There was something fitting about his bust being here, in a castle that was itself a performance of history, celebrating an actor who performed a character that wasn’t even Hungarian but became inextricably linked to Hungarian identity through Hollywood’s imagination. Bram Stoker never visited Hungary, but he set portions of Dracula here, drawing on Transylvanian folklore. The myth became intertwined with the place whether they wanted it or not.

I’d stood at Whitby Abbey just a few months earlier, filming a travel vlog on the Yorkshire coast. Whitby, where Bram Stoker actually stayed, where he walked the 199 steps up to the ruined abbey, where he set crucial scenes of Dracula. Where the count arrives in England aboard a shipwreck, a black dog leaping ashore. The abbey ruins are real, windswept, dramatic against the North Sea. Stoker saw them. Stoker wrote about them.

And yet here I was in Budapest, where Stoker never came, standing in front of a bust of a Hungarian actor commemorating his portrayal of a Transylvanian count written by an Irish author who based much of his novel on a place in Yorkshire. The geography of fiction doesn’t map neatly onto the geography of reality, but both places—Whitby and Budapest—carry the weight of the story now. Both have become Dracula sites, regardless of what Stoker intended or experienced.

By the time we reached Gundel, we were cold and hungry and ready to be inside somewhere warm. In the early 20th century, under Károly Gundel—once a protégé of César Ritz—this was among Central Europe’s most prestigious restaurants. A place where French refinement met Hungarian tradition.

Then: World War II. Communist rule. Decades of operating as a shadow version of itself. Post-1989, the slow work of restoration began. Then Covid. Then the rebranding, or reimagining, that tried to balance authenticity with a more contemporary outlook. The question underneath all of this: can you ever really go back?

Inside, the dining room was exactly what it needed to be: elegant without being stuffy, traditional without feeling like a museum. The N11 menu was explained to us: eleven iconic dishes selected from Károly Gundel’s 140 recipes, “ambassadors of Hungarian gastronomy internationally.“

I scanned the menu looking for something I hadn’t eaten yet this weekend, and landed on mangalica ragout gratin. Mangalica pork, that heritage breed with the curly hair and impossibly rich meat, slow-cooked into ragout and baked under a cheese crust.

It was obscenely rich. The pork had been cooked so long it was falling apart, melting into the sauce, which was deep and savoury and complex. The gratin top was golden and crispy, providing texture against the soft, yielding meat underneath. I’m drooling just thinking about it now, days later, back home.

I ate slowly, trying to make it last, knowing that I would probably never eat mangalica ragout this good again.

And then: Gundel palacsinta.

The restaurant’s most famous dish. A crêpe filled with rum-soaked raisins, walnuts, and lemon zest, served with rich chocolate sauce.

It was delicious. The rum had soaked into the raisins thoroughly, the walnuts provided crunch and slight bitterness, the lemon zest kept it from being cloying. The chocolate sauce was rich and slightly bitter, dark chocolate that didn’t pander but instead offered complexity.

It was also heavy. Very heavy. The kind of dessert that needed coffee, strong black coffee to cut through the richness, to make the experience complete.

But there was no time for coffee.

Andrea was checking her watch, apologising, explaining that we needed to leave now—right now—to make it to the spa on the other side of town where we had appointments beginning in mere minutes. The schedule had been disrupted all morning, and now we were behind.

The Mandala Day Spa was not what I’d expected when I’d seen “spa” and “Budapest” on the itinerary. I’d expected Széchenyi or Gellért, those grand historic bath complexes with Neo-Baroque architecture and outdoor pools steaming in cold air, water that had been flowing from natural hot springs for centuries.

Instead: Mandala Day Spa, a luxurious Oriental-themed retreat with four different pools (lukewarm, cold, pleasure, and hot), a Jacuzzi, steam room, sauna, a relaxing area with zero gravity swings and a bar. It was beautiful, modern and meticulously designed. It was also deeply impersonal in a way that made it indistinguishable from luxury spas in London, New York or Dubai.

This wasn’t even what we were supposed to be doing. The original plan had been Omorovicza Boutique & Spa,* a tour I’d been looking forward to, having used their face cleansing products before. But plans changed, as they do on press trips, and suddenly we were here instead, with a spa afternoon as the finale before the airport.

I’d bought a bathing suit hastily at Manchester Airport when the spa visit was added to the itinerary at the last minute. Now, standing in the changing room with that impulse-purchase suit, I made a calculation: get in the pools and then have to shower, dry off, repack wet things, and arrive at the airport damp and flustered. Or skip the water entirely.

I chose the massage. The twenty-minute foot treatment was everything my cobblestone-battered feet needed. The therapist was skilled and professional. My feet felt measurably better afterward. But I never tested the pools to experience whatever thermal or heated or carefully temperature-controlled water they contained. Just sat in a robe, sipping my mocktail, watching others move through the space, thinking about what I was missing and whether it mattered.

The whole experience felt like a pleasant interlude rather than an essential Budapest experience. This could be anywhere. This was the globalised wellness industry, polished and perfected, offering relaxation as a standardised product, and one I didn’t even fully participate in.

And I was grateful for it, genuinely. After three days of intensive tourism, it was a relief to just sit without having to think about history or architecture or what anything meant. To let someone massage my feet. To be horizontal for twenty minutes. To make a practical decision about not wanting to deal with wet hair on a flight.

But I would have preferred an authentic Hungarian thermal bath. Or the Omorovicza tour. Or more time at Gundel with that coffee I never got to finish.

Eventually, it was time to leave. We emerged from the spa’s dim interior back into late afternoon Budapest and found we had just enough time for one final stop before the airport.

SALT Bakery‘s pop-up on Zrínyi Street was still open, and we grabbed an assortment of pastries and cookies for the journey ahead. Across the street, CAUSE Café pulled proper espresso while we waited. It was a small mercy, that coffee, the one we hadn’t had time for at Gundel, arriving now at the trip’s end, strong and black and exactly right.

And then: the airport. The flight home. The city receding below us as we climbed, the Danube catching the light one last time, the bridges and buildings and all that complicated history becoming small, then smaller, then gone.

If you’re planning your own trip to Budapest—one where you control the itinerary, choose your own thermal baths, and have time to finish your coffee—I’ve distilled everything from this trip into a more practical Budapest travel guide here, which covers where to eat, what to see, which museums matter (imho) and an honest assessment of what’s skippable, in a (slightly) more digestable format.

This travelogue details a press trip where I was hosted by Jet2 and VisitBudapest. All thoughts and opinions are, as always, my own. All photography © Kate Baxter.

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In praise of the private page.

kate — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 13:44:24 +0000

I’ve always wanted to be someone who journals prolifically, but I’ve come to accept that my commitment to writing comes in waves. Understanding why I don’t journal consistently has taken me years, and I’m still not sure I have a satisfying answer.

So much of it happens in my head; on long walks, in the shower, lying awake at 3am. Whole passages drafted in thought, then left to evaporate. When I do put pen to paper, it’s usually at a table in a café corner or at my desk. I wish I were someone who could write sprawled on a beach towel, on a train, in bed. Whenever and wherever inspirations hits. But I need a table, a chair; a surface to ground the thoughts. This is part of why I don’t journal consistently; the conditions have to align, and often they simply don’t.

I committed to my notebook of choice a long time ago. Black Moleskines, always lined. I chose them in my early teens, mid-90s, when they felt like the pinnacle of sophistication, a talisman of the writer I wanted to become. They were expensive enough to feel serious, simple enough to feel timeless. European. Artistic. The kind of notebook Hemingway might have used.

Now, of course, they’re everywhere. Ubiquitous, mainstream, stocked in WH Smith—sorry, TGJones now, though nothing else has changed—alongside the meal deals. There are so many other options now—smaller brands with better paper, more sustainable practices, more interesting designs. I know this. I browse them sometimes, running my fingers over Japanese imports and letterpress covers. But part of me still wants to hold on tight to how Moleskines originally made me feel: like someone who took writing seriously, who might have something worth recording. That fifteen-year-old choosing her first proper notebook in a bookshop, feeling grown-up and purposeful. The familiarity of them became a part of the ritual, yes, but maybe it’s also about not wanting to let go of that earlier self entirely.

For years, I insisted on hard covers, believing all my journals should match and one day form a perfect aesthetic stack; evidence of a life lived thoughtfully, in sequence. Lately, I’ve let go of that rigidity a little, choosing soft covers instead. Moleskines that flex and bend, a little like I do now. The change feels subtle but physical: the way a soft cover folds under my palm, the way the pages curve rather than lie at right angles. I’ve even found myself hesitating in front of other brands entirely, wondering whether something different—a new paper weight, a cover that gives differently in the hand—might unlock something new. Could it loosen the words? Or am I simply stalling in a prettier way? Maybe it’s not the notebook that needs changing, but me.

***

I write for a future version of myself. Someone who will leaf back through the pages, looking for insight or reassurance. I want her to find something coherent, poised, with a thread to follow. But this instinct—this quiet performance—can be limiting. The entries that read best are often the least honest, smoothed over for the imagined reader, their rough edges trimmed away.

Susan Sontag wrote that in a journal, you don’t just express yourself; you create yourself. The journal offers an alternative to daily life. And god, that resonates, because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing without quite admitting it. The notebook isn’t a mirror reflecting who I am; it’s more like a fitting room where I try on different versions of myself. A workshop for the self, I suppose, though that makes it sound rather more industrious than the messy reality.

When I was nineteen, I tried to write myself back into a chapter that had already closed—a relationship, if I’m honest, though I couldn’t bring myself to name it directly even then. I was furious with myself for not having written it down whilst it was happening, and now I wanted to pin it to the page exactly as it had felt. Which was, of course, impossible. I’d just read Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and longed to crystallise the ache of becoming. But the words came out too smooth, too arranged. I knew, even as I wrote them, that they weren’t true. I destroyed those pages eventually, but the impulse to hold on—to record and reorder, to make something of the ephemeral—remained.

Joan Didion describes a notebook as “a private act… with meaning only for its maker,” and as much as I want to believe that, even in my most personal writing, I feel the gaze of someone else. An imagined reader. A future self. A stranger. Sometimes that gaze edits me before the words even hit the page.

Part of this comes from my first encounters with journals: Anne Frank, the fictional Adrian Mole, later Annie Ernaux and Sheila Heti. Internal thoughts made public. That vision—of my words one day being read and judged—has kept me from writing unabashedly. Even my private pages are shaped by an invisible audience. The people-pleaser in me bows to that internal pressure, and so some of my truest thoughts stay unrecorded, lost to the ether. Which probably defeats the entire point of keeping a journal, doesn’t it? If you’re performing even in private, where does authenticity actually happen? I don’t have a satisfying answer to that, only the recognition that it’s happening.

And look, I know what this might all sound like: someone so caught up in the aesthetics and theory of journalling that they’ve forgotten to actually journal. Someone who reads more about writing than they write. Who buys beautiful notebooks and leaves them half-empty. Who intellectualises a simple practice into paralysis. Who spends more time choosing between hard and soft covers than filling the bloody pages.

The uncomfortable truth is, that’s partly accurate. I am someone who can spend twenty minutes choosing the right pen, who hesitates over whether to skip a line between entries, who occasionally photographs a particularly good page layout. It’s entirely possible I’ve turned what should be a liberating practice into yet another thing to optimise and fret over. Another performance, just a private one.

But I think there’s something else happening too, underneath all that fussing and theorising. Because the reason I keep circling back to notebooks—despite the guilt, despite the half-filled pages, despite knowing I’ll never be the prolific journaller I once imagined—is that I’m still trying to figure out how to be honest. Even imperfectly. Even in fragments.

1. MOLESKINE Classic Hardcover Medium* 2. HOBONICHI Graph Notebook 3. PAPIER Daily Notes* 4. PAPIER In the Grid softback spiral notebook 5. PITH Yuzu Flex 6. AJOTO N°2 Pocket Paper 7. PAPER REPUBLIC Grand Voyageur 8. MOLESKINE Classic Soft Cover* 9. LEUCHTTURM1917 Bauhaus A5 Hardcover

***

The notebooks I do fill rarely hold the sustained, unfiltered narrative I imagine. Instead they gather lists: shopping, packing, films I meant to watch. Quotes copied from books, stray phrases, the odd doodle. There’s an accidental poetry to these scraps; clues to a moment in time. For a while, I moved these fragments to the Notes app on my phone—more convenient, I told myself, always accessible. But digital scraps lack the slow pleasure of rediscovery. They just sit there in a search bar, waiting to be summoned. They don’t surprise you three years later when you’re looking for a recipe and find instead a thought about autumn light that you’d completely forgotten.

So, over the past year, I’ve been reclaiming that slower, more tactile habit. Not quite journalling, but something adjacent. Keeping a notebook nearby to catch things as they pass; observations, quotes, half-formed thoughts I haven’t yet decided whether to trust. Virginia Woolf once wrote of her diaries as a “practice ground” for writing, but also a “storehouse” of sensation. These scraps feel the same—unglamorous, sometimes barely legible, but unmistakably mine.

It’s taken me a long while to accept that not everything needs to be well-formed to hold meaning. Fragments can be more honest than complete narratives, precisely because they’re uncensored. They are the offcuts of a mind at work, the fabric of a life stitched together imperfectly.

So perhaps that’s the truest record I can keep: not the polished stack of matching hardback Moleskines I once imagined (gathering dust, unopened, on some tasteful shelf), but this; a loose, irregular archive of moments. Shopping lists next to Woolf quotes next to doodles of Paco. It’s enough, even in pieces. Or at least, I’m learning to believe it is.

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Notes on solitude, slowness and the creative quiet.

kate — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 17:20:41 +0000

I’d been craving this for a long time.

Not a break, exactly, but a kind of spaciousness. A solo retreat in Lancaster: five days of unshared quiet. No conversations, no compromises. Just the luxury of hearing my own thoughts again; uninterrupted, unperformed, unedited.

There’s a particular quality to silence when you’re alone in a space entirely your own. That first day, I noticed it—not just the absence of sound—but the absence of being observed. The walls seemed to soften, the light landed differently and something in me exhaled. A kind of psychic quiet.

And yet, the stillness felt strange. Disorientating, even.

Five years of cohabiting softens your edges, teaches your senses to attune to another’s presence. Even when your partner is gentle and undemanding, honouring solitude as much as you, there is still a subtle weight to sharing space. A constant calibration of two inner worlds moving in parallel.

That first day, I missed him—and Paco—more than I’d expected. I’d longed for solitude, then mourned the absence.

I’d come with so many expectations: to read deeply, to sketch, to paint, to plan. To find stillness and clarity. And, ideally, some great revelation. But expectations don’t sit well with quiet; they hum too loudly. They hover in the corners and tap their fingers on the table.

In the end, I had to let them go. Not all at once, but slowly, and in pieces.

My days in Lancaster soon found their own rhythm, shaped less by intention than by light. I woke early, stirred by soft sunlight slipping through the skylight above the bed, then padded barefoot across the warm wooden floor to make coffee.

There was something deeply satisfying about that small ritual. The scent of freshly ground beans from Atkinson’s, the soft plunge of the coffee press, the quiet echo of birdsong through the open kitchen window. I’d settle beneath a blanket on the sofa and read, page by page, without checking the time.

Each day I wandered slowly through the city, with no fixed plan other than coffee or air. Lancaster is compact and quietly elegant, all Georgian façades, slate rooftops, uneven pavements and sun-warmed lanes.

In the afternoons, I painted. A jug of tulips on the kitchen table, their stems lazily angled in the sunlight. I picked up watercolours again last year after decades of disuse. I’m not especially skilled—my technique hasn’t evolved much since I was a teenager—but there’s something about the fluidity of the medium that feels forgiving, even generous. It invites you to relinquish control, to let the pigment pool and spread, and see what blooms.

And that was the point. Not to make something good, or useful, or even beautiful. Just to make. To watch colour move across paper. To notice shape, line, and shadow. To disappear into a process that doesn’t need to lead anywhere. The quiet joy of creating something entirely for myself.

One afternoon I walked up to Williamson Park, past crooked garden walls and quiet terraces. At the top, the Ashton Memorial rose into view, perched high above the trees. The air was crisp and clear, the view stretching across Morecambe Bay to the faint outline of the Lake District. I stayed there for a long time, not looking for anything in particular, just taking it all in.

I hadn’t set out to explore every corner of the city — this solo retreat in Lancaster wasn’t about discovery in the outward sense, but about circling inward. A chance to live slowly, and let the hours arrange themselves around rituals of coffee, reading, walking, painting and rest. There was no urgency to do Lancaster. No list of must-sees. And maybe that’s why it felt like such a good place to be alone. It made room, without fuss. It let me inhabit it quietly, fully, without performance. Which, in its own way, felt like the deepest kind of hospitality.

It’s easy to romanticise time alone when you haven’t had much of it. But the solitude I’d been craving wasn’t just logistical, it was psychic. A return to the version of myself that existed before the ambient hum of domestic life began to shape my inner weather. I’d lived alone once, for three transformative years. I learned the contours of silence, and found a strange, steady companionship in my own company. I’d forgotten how restorative that could be, and how necessary. It’s a form of rest that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve known its absence. Not rest as in sleep, or even relaxation, but rest as in the release of vigilance.

It’s hard to say what changed. I didn’t come home with grand plans or sudden clarity. I didn’t solve anything. But something shifted—not loudly, not all at once—just a gentle reordering of my internal landscape. A loosening of the grip I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.

Solitude, I was reminded, is not indulgence but restoration.

Creativity can exist without purpose.

And time moves differently when you stop counting it.

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A gentle endnote.

kate — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:00:27 +0000

This final 3daysofdesign post isn’t a roundup or a review.

It’s something softer. A short coda, composed in hindsight, gathering a few of the craft-led design brands and objects that have lingered in my mind long after the fair was over, from smaller studios and thoughtful makers.

NIKO JUNE

The first thing I noticed at Other Circle was a chair. Or rather, a small flock of them, slightly off-kilter, quietly defiant. Niko June’s Sommerfugl chairs felt familiar but strange, like school chairs with new intentions. Scratched legs, crooked screws, a shift in posture; transformed through minimal interference rather than total reinvention. The name means butterfly. A gentle nod to evolution, not nostalgia.

Later, scrolling through Niko June’s Instagram, I fell headlong into their world. Based in Copenhagen, Niko June is part studio, part workshop, part living experiment in how objects shape us and how we, in turn, shape them. Their work feels less like product design and more like an ongoing study in material memory. What they call good objects aren’t precious or pristine. They’re humble things, touched by use, reimagined and made to endure.

The Sommerfugl collection began with old school chairs, lifted from classrooms, reworked in their workshop and reassembled with the lightest of interference. That same sensibility runs through the rest of their offering. The Kantine collection of borosilicate glassware echoes service stations and school canteens: stackable, durable, softened by colour. Pink, amber, yellow, clear—tones that tint the ordinary with something slightly cinematic. The espresso cups come in chalky glazes that feel like they belong in a Wes Anderson film, without ever trying too hard.

Then there’s the Pick Up Line: a curated cabinet of curious objects that Niko June didn’t design, but recontextualised. Steel cutlery. Plates. Readymade pieces plucked from obscurity and given a second life. This is where the brand’s wit comes through; design as flirtation, not just function.

What draws me in most is their refusal to over-explain. Their world is built through feeling; editorial images that speak in texture and tone. A quiet cabinet of objects that live well, feel good in the hand, and speak softly—but surely—of care. Their approach to craft-led design feels instinctive rather than strategic, shaped by memory as much as material.

RYE

At Home from Home, it was the quiet presence of a low bed that drew me in: clean lines, softened edges and the grounding weight of wood. I later learned it was by Rye, a Danish brand creating bedroom furniture that feels as restful as it looks. Anchored in natural materials and a slower pace of production, their pieces help shape the mood of a room.

After the show, I found myself returning to their collection online, drawn especially to the Hem bed frame designed by Nikolaj Lorentz Mentze of Studio 0405. Sculpted from solid red oak, its stacked architecture allows the material to speak for itself, grain patterns flowing like quiet topography across each surface. The Ejer and Alken frames echo a similar restraint: pared back, low slung, refined to essentials.

RYE describes its work as “a humble act of mediation”, and it’s easy to see why. The designs are minimal but not cold, rooted in a respect for material and process, made slowly and locally in the Danish Lake Highlands. This is craft-led design in its purest form: considered, local, lasting. Each piece is built to order, allowing time for craft and care. In a world of overproduction, I always find something profoundly calming about a made-to-order practice. To me, these are beds that understand the value of rest. Not just sleep, but stillness. Space to retreat, to read, to be. The kind of design that becomes invisible in the best way, by quietly supporting the rhythms of everyday life.

The Wren

I spotted  The Wren’s Arbor blanket casually draped across the Rye bed at Home from Home like it belonged there.

Handwoven from mohair and wool, it had that unmistakable mix of softness and weight, the kind of texture that makes you instinctively reach out and touch it. It looked right at home in the setting, promising warmth, ease and a sense of stillness.

Later, scrolling through the brand’s Instagram, I felt that same atmosphere. Quiet, natural, unfussy. Just beautifully made pieces that speak for themselves. There’s no over-styling, no clever captions—just the gentle tactility of wool, light falling across folded blankets and the suggestion of cooler months ahead.

Founded by Virginia Star Busmann and Ellen Nevrokopska, who share a love for materials that feel good and last well, The Wren blankets are made in Spain using Angora fibres from local farms, following traditional hand-weaving techniques passed down through generations. A brand deeply embedded in craft-led design principles, their work feels rooted in both comfort and continuity. The result is something deeply comforting: breathable, crease-resistant, kind to skin and perfect for layering through autumn and beyond.

It’s a brand that doesn’t shout. Instead, it offers a quiet kind of luxury: an invitation to slow down, wrap up and settle in.

Bread and Butter

Across the street from Home from Home, another kind of domesticity was unfolding. Bread and Butter’s first exhibition, in collaboration with Ouri—Kopan’s newest restaurant venture—felt like a quiet study in connection. Twelve designers from Korea, Denmark, and the Netherlands were invited to explore the theme of the Perfect Pair, creating dining objects that speak not only to function but to relationship. Forms that complete one another. Shapes that echo and support. Pieces that rely on something else to become whole.

There was Union by Ae Office: a porcelain fruit bowl, candleholder, and vase, each holding its own purpose but designed to work in dialogue—mapped across an imagined circular grid on the table. On their own they’re sculptural; together, they hum with gentle order.

Or Poom, a delicate cup and saucer by Hun Lee, where the cup cannot stand alone. It only finds balance when held by its base. A quiet metaphor for support, drawn from the Korean word Poomasi, meaning to help one another.

Some pieces were more playful, like Laura Bilde’s stainless steel Ice Cream Cup, a geometric duet of form and function, neither part able to stand without the other. Maria Bruun’s Coaster Carafe and Glass spoke to mutuality too, anchored by a rounded glass bead that links object and user, carafe and cup. Even A Piece of Seating by Kihyun Kim—modular stools that nest into benches—felt less like furniture and more like a meditation on shared space.

What stayed with me wasn’t any single object, but the quiet intelligence of the whole. Each piece offered a poetic expression of craft-led design: made with intention, meant for connection. Thoughtful pairings and functional poetics. A still life of togetherness.

Obstacles

I first encountered Obstacles at Home from Home, where their Sobremesa table anchored the kitchen with a quiet, grounding presence. Designed in collaboration with Charlotte Taylor for The Orb (a new platform for collectable design launching in October 2025), the piece offered more than surface or structure; it became part of the rhythm of the room. A space for meals, meetings and moments in between.

Founded by Sheila Llovet, Obstacles is a Spanish design brand built on the principle of conscious simplification. Their practice is rooted in craft-led design, where form is pared back just enough to let the essential speak. Tables, stands and storage pieces are guided by geometry and softened by use, made in close collaboration with Spanish woodworkers who carry generations of skill. These are pieces you live with; practical, versatile and built to last, right down to the joinery, which forgoes glue in favour of an assembly system that adapts as the wood naturally shifts over time.

I especially loved Tabi, a sculptural stand designed with artist Bruno Ollé. It’s the kind of piece that invites play, part object, part invitation to reimagine how we place and relate to things in a space. Like the Sister table, whose rounded form encourages gathering, or the Ernest desk, which quietly shifts between writing surface, headboard or console, depending on what’s needed. Even the Eileen bedside table reveals hidden potential: two magnetically connected parts that separate, transforming the top into a tray. There’s something deeply thoughtful in these transformations; small shifts that support dynamic living without disrupting it.

While much of Obstacles’ work is defined by architectural precision, the Marina sofa softens the edges. A single, subtle curve along the upholstery offers comfort and gesture, paired with a solid oak frame and removable backrests that let the piece adapt over time. In every piece, there’s a calm clarity. A sense that this is furniture designed to move with you; supportive, tactile, and grounded in the rhythms of daily life.

It’s easy, at a design fair, to be swept up by what everyone’s talking about. But it’s the quiet finds, the under-the-radar names and pieces you stumble upon by chance that often stay with you longest.

These craft-led design encounters reminded me why I travel for design at all. Not just to stay current, but to stay curious. To be surprised. To find the thing I didn’t know I was looking for. And then, to share it—gently, thoughtfully—in the hope it might speak to someone else, too.

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